^•STUDIES   OF 

THE  STAGE 


BY 
BRANDER  MATTHEWS 

h 


NEW   YORK 

HARPER   AND   BROTHERS 

MDCCCXCIV 


•8/7 


Copyright,  1894,  by  HARPER  &  BROTHERS 


All  rights  reserved. 


To  AGNES  ETHEL,  who  once  adorned 
the  Stage  for  an  all  too  brief  period,  these 
Studies  are  inscribed  by  her  friend  of 
many  years,  the  A  UTHOR 


4036 


PREFATORY  NOTE 


THESE  essays  upon  theatrical  subjects  differ 
from  most  other  papers  about  plays  and  play- 
wrights, mainly  because  of  the  writer's  different 
point  of  view.  While  the  theatrical  critic  in 
general  looks  at  the  drama  from  his  seat  in  the 
orchestra,  my  standpoint  has  always  been  the 
stage  itself.  Being,  for  my  own  part,  a  maker 
of  plays,  I  have  considered  the  art  of  the  drama- 
tist with  a  fuller  understanding  of  its  technic,  I 
hope,  and  with  a  more  intimate  sympathy,  I 
think,  than  is  possible  to  those  who  know  the 
stage  only  from  the  far  side  of  the  footlights. 
In  fact,  I  am  quite  willing  to  have  this  little 
volume  considered  as  an  argument  in  favor  of 
the  contention  that  dramatic  literature  must 
approve  itself  as  drama  first,  before  it  need  be 
discussed  as  literature. 

COLUMBIA  COLLEGE, 
February,  1894. 


CONTENTS 


Chap.  Page 

I.  THE  DRAMATIZATION  OF  NOVELS i 

II.  THE  DRAMATIC  OUTLOOK  IN  AMERICA   ...  39 

III.  THE  PLAYERS 77 

IV.  CHARLES  LAMB  AND  THE  THEATRE     ....  96 
V.  TWO  FRENCH  THEATRICAL  CRITICS  : 

I.  M.  FRANCISQUE  SARCEY 126 

II.  M.  JULES  LEMAITRE ''.    .  150 

VI.  ASIDES: 

I.  SHAKSPERE,     MOLIERE,     AND     MODERN 

ENGLISH  COMEDY 176 

II.  THE  OLD  COMEDIES 190 

III.  A  PLEA  FOR  FARCE 203 


":":         •    • 

or  r 
UNIVERSITY 


*"  O  R 
THE  DRAMAfffitfFfOT  OF  NOVELS 


* literary  tasks  seem  easier 
of  accomplishment  than  the 
making  of  a  good  play  out 
of  a  good  novel.  The  play- 
wright has  ready  to  his  hand 
a  story,  a  sequence  of  situations,  a  group 
of  characters  artfully  contrasted,  the  sug- 
gestion of  the  requisite  scenery,  and  oc- 
casional passages  of  appropriate  con- 
versation. What  more  is  needed  than 
a  few  sheets  of  paper  and  a  pair  of 
scissors,  a  pen  and  a  little  plodding  pa- 
tience ?  The  pecuniary  reward  is  abun- 
dant; apparently  the  feat  is  temptingly 
facile ;  and  every  year  we  see  many  writers 
succumb  to  the  temptation.  Whenever  a 
novel  hits  the  popular  fancy  and  is  seen 
for  a  season  in  everybody's  hands,  be  it 
Mr.  Barnes  of  New  York  or  She,  The 
Quick  or  the  Dead?  or  Robert  Elsmere, 
the  adapter  steps  forward  and  sets  the 


story  on  the  stage,  counting  on  the  re- 
flected reputation  of  the  novel  to  attract 
the  public  to  witness  the  play.  But  the 
result  of  the  calculation  is  rarely  satisfac- 
tory, and  the  dramatized  romance  is  rare- 
ly successful.  Frequently  it  is  an  instant 
failure,  like  the  recent  perversion  of  Rob- 
ert Elsmere  ;  occasionally  it  is  forced  into 
a  fleeting  popularity  by  managerial  wiles, 
like  the  stage  versions  of  She  and  Mr. 
Barnes  oj  New  York  ;  and  only  nowr  and 
again  is  it  really  welcomed  by  the  public, 
like  the  dramatizations  of  Little  Lord 
Fauntleroy  and  Uncle  Toms  Cabin.  So 
it  is  that,  if  we  look  back  along  the  lists 
of  plays  which  have  had  prolonged  popu- 
larity, we  shall  find  the  titles  of  very  few 
dramatizations,  and  we  shall  discover  that 
those  which  chance  to  linger  in  our  mem- 
ory are  recalled  chiefly  because  of  a  for- 
tuitous association  with  the  fame  of  a 
favorite  actor;  thus  the  semi -operatic 
version  of  Guy  Manner  ing  brings  before 
us  Charlotte  Cushman's  weird  embodi- 
ment of  Meg  Merrilies,  just  as  the  artless 
adaptation  of  the  Gilded  Age  evokes  the 
joyous  humor  of  John  T.  Raymond  as 


Colonel  Sellers.  And  if  we  were  to  make 
out  a  list  of  novels  which  have  been 
adapted  to  the  stage  in  the  past  thirty 
years  or  so,  we  should  discover  a  rarely 
broken  record  of  overwhelming  disaster. 
The  reason  of  this  is  not  far  to  seek. 
It  is  to  be  found  in  the  fundamental  dif- 
ference between  the  art  of  the  drama  and 
the  art  of  prose  -  fiction  —  a  difference 
which  the  adapter  has  generally  ignored 
or  been  ignorant  of.  Perhaps  it  is  not 
unfair  to  suggest  that  the  methods  of  the 
dramatist  and  of  the  novelist  are  as  unlike 
as  the  methods  of  the  sculptor  and  of  the 
painter.  The  difference  between  the  play 
and  the  novel  is  at  bottom  the  differ- 
ence between  a  precise  and  rigid  form, 
and  a  form  of  almost  unlimited  range  and 
flexibility.  The  drama  has  laws  as  un- 
bending as  those  of  the  sonnet,  while  the 
novel  may  extend  itself  to  the  full  license 
of  an  epic.  It  is  hardly  too  much  to  say 
that  nowadays  the  novelist  has  complete 
freedom  in  choice  of  subject  and  in  meth- 
od of  treatment.  He  may  be  concise  or 
he  may  be  prolix.  He  may  lay  the  scene 
of  his  story  in  a  desert,  and  find  his  effect 


in  the  slow  analysis  of  a  single  human 
soul  in  awful  solitude ;  or  he  may  create 
a  regiment  of  characters  which  shall  per- 
form intricate  evolutions  and  move  in 
serried  ranks  through  the  crowded  streets 
of  a  busy  city.  He  may  riot  in  the  great 
phenomena  of  nature,  forcing  the  tornado, 
the  gale  at  sea,  the  plunge  of  a  cataract, 
the  purple  sunset  after  a  midsummer 
storm,  to  create  his  catastrophe  or  to  typi- 
fy some  mood  of  his  hero.  He  may  be  a 
persistent  pessimist,  believing  that  all  is 
for  the  worst  in  the  worst  of  all  possible 
worlds,  and  painting  his  fellow -man  in 
harsh  black-and-white,  with  a  most  mod- 
erate use  of  the  white.  He  may  be  a 
philosopher,  using  a  thin  veil  of  fiction  as 
a  transparent  mask  for  the  exposition  of 
his  system  of  life.  He  may  adopt  the 
novel  as  a  platform  or  as  a  pulpit ;  he 
may  use  it  as  a  means  or  he  may  accept  it 
as  an  end  ;  he  may  do  with  it  what  he  will ; 
and  if  he  be  a  man  to  whom  the  world 
wishes  to  listen  or  a  man  who  has  really 
something  to  say,  he  gains  a  hearing. 

In  contrast  with  the  license  of  the  nov- 
elist the  limitations  of  the  dramatist  were 


never  more  distinct  than  they  are  to-day. 
As  the  playwright  appeals  to  the  play- 
goer, he  is  confined  to  those  subjects  in 
which  the  broad  public  can  be  interested 
and  to  the  treatment  which  the  broad 
public  will  accept.  While  the  writer  of 
romance  may  condense  his  work  into  a 
short  story  of  a  column  or  two,  or  expand 
it  to  a  stout  tome  of  a  thousand  pages, 
the  writer  for  the  stage  has  no  such 
choice  ;  his  work  must  be  bulky  enough 
to  last  from  half-past  eight  to  half-past 
ten  at  the  shortest,  or  at  the  longest  from 
eight  to  eleven.  In  the  present  condi- 
tion of  the  theatre  in  Great  Britain  and 
the  United  States,  there  is  little  or  no 
demand  for  the  comedietta  or  for  the 
two  -  act  comedy ;  a  play  must  be  long 
enough  and  strong  enough  to  furnish 
forth  the  whole  evening's  entertainment. 
The  dramatist  may  divide  his  piece  into 
three,  or  four,  or  five  acts,  as  he  may  pre- 
fer, but  except  from  some  good  and  suffi- 
cient reason,  there  must  be  but  a  single 
scene  to  each  act.  The  characters  must 
be  so  many  in  number  that  no  one  shall 
seem  unduly  obtrusive ;  they  must  be 


sharply  contrasted  ;  most  of  them  must 
be  sympathetic  to  the  spectators,  for  the 
audience  in  a  theatre,  however  pessimistic 
it  may  be  individually,  is  always  optimis- 
tic as  a  whole.  There  must  be  an  infu- 
sion of  humor  at  recurrent  intervals,  and 
a  slowly  increasing  intensity  of  emotional 
stress.  In  short,  the  fetters  of  the  dram- 
atist are  as  obvious  as  is  the  freedom  of 
the  novelist. 

Perhaps  the  chief  disadvantage  under 
which  the  dramatist  labors  is  that  it  is 
almost  impossible  for  him  to  show  ade- 
quately the  progressive  and  wellnigh  im- 
perceptible disintegration  of  character 
under  the  attrition  of  recurring  circum- 
stance. Time  and  space  are  both  beyond 
the  control  of  the  maker  of  plays,  while 
the  story-teller  may  take  his  hero  by  slow 
stages  to  the  world's  end.  The  drama 
has  but  five  acts  at  most,  and  the  theatre 
is  but  a  few  yards  wide.  Description  is 
scarcely  permissible  in  a  play  ;  and  it  may 
be  the  most  beautiful  and  valuable  part 
of  a  novel.  Comment  by  the  author  is 
absolutely  impossible  on  the  stage  ;  and 
there  are  many  who  love  certain  novels — 


Thackeray's  for  example — chiefly  because 
they  feel  therein  the  personal  presence  of 
the  author.  It  is  at  once  the  merit  and 
the  difficulty  of  dramatic  art  that  the 
characters  must  reveal  themselves ;  they 
must  be  illuminated  from  within,  not  from 
without ;  they  must  speak  for  themselves 
in  unmistakable  terms;  and  the  author 
cannot  dissect  them  for  us  or  lay  bare 
their  innermost  thoughts  with  his  pen  as 
with  a  scalpel.  The  drama  must  needs 
be  synthetic,  while  now  the  novel,  more 
often  than  not,  is  analytic.  The  vocabu- 
lary of  the  playwright  must  be  clear,  suc- 
cinct, precise,  and  picturesque,  while  that 
of  the  novelist  may  be  archaic,  fantastic, 
subtle,  or  allusive.  Simplicity  and  direct- 
ness are  the  ear-marks  of  a  good  play  ;  but 
we  all  know  good  novels  which  are  com- 
plex, involute,  tortuous.  A  French  critic 
has  declared  that  the  laws  of  the  drama 
are  Logic  and  Movement,  by  which  he 
means  that  in  a  good  play  the  subject 
clearly  exposed  at  first  moves  forward  by 
regular  steps,  artfully  prepared,  straight  to 
its  inevitable  end. 

After  all,  art  is  but  a  question  of  se- 


lection :  no  man  can  put  the  whole  of 
life  either  on  the  stage  or  into  a  book. 
He  must  choose  the  facts  which  seem  to 
him  salient  and  which  will  best  serve  his 
purpose.  He  must  reject  unhesitatingly 
all  the  others,  as  valuable  in  themselves, 
it  may  be,  but  foreign  to  the  work  in 
hand.  The  principles  differ  which  gov- 
ern this  selection  by  the  dramatist  and 
by  the  novelist.  Details  which  are  insig- 
nificant in  a  story  may  be  of  the  greatest 
value  in  a  play  ;  and  effects  of  prime  im- 
portance in  the  tale  may  be  contrary 
to  the  practice  of  the  playwright,  or 
even  physically  impossible  on  the  stage. 
George  Sand  was  a  great  novelist  who 
was  passionately  occupied  with  the  the- 
atre, although  she  was  wholly  without 
the  dramatic  gift ;  and  in  his  biographi- 
cal study  of  her  career  and  her  charac- 
ter the  late  M.  Caro  noted  her  constant, 
failure  as  a  dramatist,  both  with  original 
plays  and  with  adaptations  of  her  own 
novels,  declaring  in  these  words  the  rea- 
son of  this  failure  :  "  What  is  needed  on 
the  stage  is  the  art  of  relief,  the  instinct 
of  perspective,  adroitness  of  combination, 


and,  above  all,  action,  again  action,  and 
always  action.  It  is  natural  and  laughter- 
forcing  gayety,  or  the  secret  of  powerful 
emotion,  or  the  unexpectedness  which 
grips  the  attention  " — all  qualities  which 
George  Sand  lacked. 

A  mere  sequence  of  tableaux  vivants, 
even  if  it  include  the  characters  and  pre- 
sent the  situations  of  a  successful  tale, 
is  not  necessarily  a  successful  play,  and 
certainly  it  is  not  a  good  play.  It  is  easy 
enough  to  scissor  a  panorama  of  scenes 
from  a  story,  but  to  make  over  the  story 
itself  into  a  play  is  not  so  easy.  To  get 
a  true  play  out  of  a  novel,  the  dramatist 
must  translate  the  essential  idea  from  the 
terms  of  narrative  into  the  terms  of  the 
drama.  He  must  disengage  the  funda- 
mental subject  from  the  accidental  inci- 
dents with  which  the  novelist  has  pre- 
sented it.  He  must  strip  it  to  the  skeleton, 
and  then  he  must  clothe  these  bare  bones 
with  new  flesh  and  fresh  muscle  in  ac- 
cordance with  the  needs  of  the  theatre. 
He  must  disentangle  the  primary  action 
and  set  this  on  the  stage,  clearly  and  sim- 
ply. To  do  this  it  may  be  necessary  to 


modify  characters,  to  alter  the  sequence 
of  scenes,  to  simplify  motives,  to  con- 
dense, to  clarify,  to  heighten.  The  more 
famous  the  novel — one  might  almost  say 
trfe  better  the  novel — the  less  likely  is  it 
to  make  a  good  play,  because  there  is 
then  a  greater  difficulty  in  disengaging 
the  main  theme  from  its  subsidiary  de- 
velopments ;  and  even  when  the  play- 
wright understands  his  trade,  and  realizes 
the  gulf  which  yawns  between  the  novel 
and  the  drama,  the  temptation  to  retain 
this  fine  scene  of  the  story,  or  that  deli- 
cately drawn  character,  or  the  other  strik- 
ing episode,  is  often  too  strong  to  be  over- 
come, though  he  knows  full  well  that 
these  things  are  alien  to  the  real  play,  as 
it  ought  to  be.  The  playwright  is  con- 
scious that  the  play-goers  may  look  for 
these  unessential  scenes  and  characters 
and  episodes,  and  he  yields  despite  his 
judgment.  Then  in  the  end  the  play  be- 
comes a  mere  series  of  magic -lantern 
slides  to  illustrate  the  book  ;  the  real  and 
the  essential  disappear  behind  the  acci- 
dental and  incidental ;  and  the  spectator 
cannot  see  the  forest  for  the  trees.  The 


dramatizations  of  Scott,  of  Cooper,  and 
of  Dickens,  whatever  their  temporary 
popularity  might  be,  and  their  immediate 
pecuniary  success,  were  none  of  them 
good  plays,  nor  were  they  ever  wholly 
satisfactory  to  those  who  knew  and  loved 
the  original  novels.  And  Scott,  Cooper, 
and  Dickens  are  all  sturdy  and  robust 
story-tellers,  whose  tales,  one  would  think, 
might  readily  lend  themselves  to  the  free- 
hand treatment  and  distemper  illumina- 
tion of  the  theatre.  And  Uncle  Toms 
Cabin  has  had  much  the  same  fate  on 
the  stage:  the  rough-hewn  dramas  made 
out  of  it  have  succeeded  by  no  art  of  their 
own,  but  because  of  the  overwhelming  in- 
terest of  the  novel.  I  know  of  no  stage 
version  of  Mrs.  Stowe's  story,  or  of  any 
novel  of  Scott,  of  Cooper,  or  of  Dickens, 
which  has  either  organic  unity  or  artistic 
symmetry. 

The  finer  the  novel,  the  more  delicate 
and  delightful  its  workmanship,  the  more 
subtle  its  psychology,  the  greater  is  the 
difficulty  in  dramatizing  it,  and  the  great- 
er the  ensuing  disappointment.  The  fre- 
quent attempts  to  turn  into  a  play  Vani- 


ty  Fair  and  the  Scarlet  -Letter  were  all 
doomed  to  the  certainty  of  failure,  be- 
cause the  development  of  the  central 
character  and  the  leading  motives,  as  we 
see  them  in  the  pages  of  the  novelist,  are 
not  those  by  which  they  would  best  be 
revealed  before  the  footlights.  A  true 
dramatist  might  treat  dramatically  the 
chief  figures  of  Thackeray's  novel  or  of 
Hawthorne's  romance.  I  can  conceive  a 
Becky  Sharp  play  and  an  Arthur  Dimmes- 
dale  drama — the  first  a  comedy,  with  un- 
derlying emotion  ;  and  the  second  a  trag- 
edy, noble  in  its  simple  dignity ;  but  neither 
of  these  possible  plays  would  be  in  any 
strict  sense  of  the  word  dramatized  from 
the  novel,  although  the  germinant  sug- 
gestion was  derived  from  Thackeray  and 
from  Hawthorne.  They  would  be  origi- 
nal plays,  independent  in  form,  in  treat- 
ment, and  in  movement ;  much  as  "  All 
for  Her  "  is  an  original  play  by  Messrs. 
Simpson  and  Merivale,  though  it  was  ob- 
viously suggested  by  the  essential  ideas 
of  Henry  Esmond  and  A  Tale  of  Two 
Cities,  which  were  adroitly  combined  by 
two  accomplished  playwrights  feeling 


themselves  at  liberty  to  develop  their 
theme  without  any  sense  of  responsibility 
to  the  novelists.  In  like  manner  Mr. 
Boucicault's  admirably  effective  dramas, 
the  "  Colleen  Bavvn "  and  the  "  Long 
Strike/'are  founded, one  on  the  Collegians 
of  Gerald  Griffin,  and  the  other  on  Mrs. 
Gaskell's  Mary  Barton ;  but  the  drama- 
tist, while  availing  himself  freely  of  the 
novelist's  labors,  held  himself  equally  free 
to  borrow  from  them  no  more  than  he 
saw  fit,  and  felt  in  nowise  bound  to  pre- 
serve in  the  play  what  did  not  suit  him 
in  the  story.  I  am  told  that  the  founda- 
tion of  Lord  Lytton's  "  Richelieu  "  can  be 
discovered  in  a  romance  by  G.  P.  R. 
James  ;  and  I  have  heard  that  a  little 
story  by  Jules  Sandeau  was  the  exciting 
cause  of  MM.  Sandeau  and  Augier's 
"  Gendre  de  M.  Poirier,"  the  finest  come- 
dy of  our  century.  At  all  times  have 
playwrights  been  prone  to  take  a  ready- 
made  myth.  The  great  Greeks  did  it, 
using  Homer  as  a  quarry  from  which  to 
get  the  rough  blocks  of  marble  needed 
for  their  heroic  statues ;  while  Shake- 
speare and  Moliere  found  material  for 


more  than  one  piece  in  contemporary 
prose-fiction.  But  it  would  be  absurd  to 
consider  any  of  these  plays  as  a  mere 
dramatization  of  a  novel. 

The  difficulties  and  disadvantages  of 
trying  to  make  a  play  out  of  a  popular 
tale,  when  the  sequence  and  development 
of  the  story  must  be  retained  in  the 
drama,  are  so  distinctly  recognized  by 
novelists  who  happen  also  to  be  drama- 
tists, that  they  are  prone  to  stand  aside 
and  to  leave  the  doubtful  task  to  others. 
Dumas  did  not  himself  make  a  play  out 
of  his  romantic  tale,  the  Corsican  Brothers. 
And  in  the  fall  of  1887  there  were  pro- 
duced in  Paris  two  adaptations  of  suc- 
cessful novels  which  had  been  written  by 
accomplished  dramatists,  U  Abbe  Const  an- 
tin,  by  M.  Ludovic  Halevy,  and  L Affaire 
Cletnenceau,  by  M.  Alexandre  Dumas  fils; 
and  in  neither  case  did  the  dramatist 
adapt  his  own  story.  He  knew  better; 
he  knew  that  the  good  novel  would  not 
make  a  good  play  ;  and  while  the  novice 
rushed  in  where  the  expert  feared  to  tread, 
the  original  author  stood  aside  ready  to 
take  the  profit,  but  not  to  run  the  risk. 


I  trust  that  I  have  not  suggested  that 
there  are  no  novels  which  it  is  profitable 
or  advisable  to  adapt  to  the  stage.  Such 
was  not  my  'intent,  at  least.  What  I 
wished  to  point  out  was  that  a  panorama 
was  not  a  play  ;  that  to  make  a  play  out 
of  a  novel  properly  was  a  most  difficult 
task ;  and  that  the  more  widely  popular 
the  story,  the  less  likely  was  the  resultant 
piece  to  be  valuable,  because  of  the  great- 
er pressure  to  retain  scenes  foreign  to  the 
main  theme  as  necessarily  simplified  and 
strengthened  for  the  theatre. 

Sometimes  a  story  is  readily  set  on  the 
stage,  because  it  was  planned  for  the  the- 
atre before  it  appeared  as  a  book.  M. 
Georges  Ohnet's  "  Serge  Panine,"  for  ex- 
ample, was  first  written  as  a  play  and 
afterwards  as  a  novel,  although  the  piece 
was  not  performed  until  after  the  story 
had  achieved  success.  Charles  Reade's 
Peg  Woffington  is  avowedly  founded  on 
the  comedy  of "  Masks  and  Faces,"  which 
Reade  had  written  in  collaboration  with 
Tom  Taylor,  and  of  which  it  may  seem 
to  be  a  dramatization.  Reade  also  found 
it  easy  to  make  an  effective  play  out  of 


his  Never  Too  Late  to  Mend,  because  this 
novel  was  itself  based  on  "  Gold,"  an  ear- 
lier piece  of  his. 

Nor  is  this  ex-post-facto  "dramatization 
the  only  possible  or  proper  adaptation  of 
a  novel.  A  story  of  straightforward  emo- 
tion may  often  be  set  on  the  stage  to  ad- 
vantage, and  with  less  alteration  than  is 
demanded  by  the  more  complex  novel  of 
character.  Mr.  R.  L.  Stevenson  declares 
that  "  a  good  serious  play  must  be  found- 
ed on  one  of  the  passionate  cruces  of  life, 
where  duty  and  inclination  come  nobly 
to  the  grapple  ;  and  the  same  is  true  of 
what  I  call,  for  that  reason,  the  dramatic 
novel."  Now  it  is  this  dramatic  novel, 
handling  broadly  a  pregnant  emotion, 
which  can  most  often  be  dramatized  suc- 
cessfully and  satisfactorily.  And  yet,  even 
then,  the  story  is  perhaps  best  set  on  the 
stage  by  a  playwright  who  has  never  read 
it.  This  may  sound  like  a  paradox,  but  I 
can  readily  explain  what  I  mean.  A  well- 
known  French  piece,  "  Miss  Multon,"  is 
obviously  founded  on  the  .English  novel 
East  Lynne.  I  once  asked  M.  Eugene 
Nus,  one  of  the  authors  of "  Miss  Multon," 


how  he  came  to  adapt  an  English  book  ; 
and  he  laughingly  answered  that  nei- 
ther he  nor  his  collaborator,  M.  Adolphe 
Belot,  had  ever  read  East  Lynne.  At  a 
pause  during  a  rehearsal  of  another  play 
of  theirs,  an  actress  had  told  M.  Belot 
that  she  had  just  finished  a  story  which 
would  make  an  excellent  play,  and  there- 
upon she  gave  him  the  plot  of  Mrs. 
Wood's  novel.  And  the  plot,  the  primary 
suggestion,  the  first  nucleus  of  situation 
and  character,  this  is  all  these  dramatists 
needed  ;  and  in  most  cases  it  is  all  that 
the  dramatist  ought  to  borrow  from  the 
novelist.  It  is  thus  that  we  may  account 
in  part  for  the  merit  of  Mr.  Pinero's  play 
"  The  Squire,"  which  is  perhaps  more  or 
less  remotely  derived  from  Mr.  Hardy's 
Far  from  the  Madding  Crowd.  Not  to 
have  read  the  story  he  is  to  dramatize  is, 
however,  a  privilege  possible  to  but  few 
playwrights. 

The  next  best  thing  is  to  have  the  need- 
ful power  to  disengage  the  main  theme 
of  the  story  and  to  be  able  to  reincarnate 
this  in  a  dramatic  body.  A  good  exam- 
ple may  be  seen  in  "  Esmeralda,"  the  com- 


edy  which  Mr.  William  Gillette  helped 
Mrs.  Burnett  to  make  out  of  a  tale  of 
hers.  But  this  has  been  done  so  rarely 
on  the  English-speaking  stage  that  I  must 
perforce  seek  other  examples  in  France. 
As  it  happens  I  can  name  three  plays,  all 
founded  on  novels,  all  adapted  to  the 
stage  by  the  novelist  himself,  and  all  really 
superior  to  the  novels  from  which  they 
were  taken.  M.  Jules  Sandeau's  Made- 
moiselle de  la  Seigliere  is  a  pretty  tale, 
but  the  comedy  which  the  late  eminent 
comedian,  M.  Regnier,  of  the  Comedie- 
Frangaise,  aided  M.  Sandeau  to  found 
upon  it  is  far  finer  as  a  work  of  litera- 
ture. Le  Marquis  de  Villemer  of  George 
Sand  is  a  lovely  novel,  but  it  lacks  the 
firmness,  the  force,  and  the  symmetry  to 
be  found  in  the  play  which  M.  Alexandre 
Dumas  fils  helped  her  to  construct  from 
it,  and  which,  therefore,  won  the  popular 
favor  denied  to  most  of  her  other  dra- 
matic attempts.  And  in  like  manner  M. 
Dumas  himself  recom posed  his  Dame  aux 
Camelzas,  and  made  a  moving  novel  into 
one  of  the  most  moving  plays  of  our  time. 
In  all  three  cases  the  drama  is  widely  dif- 


ferent  from  the  story,  and  the  many  heed- 
ful modifications  have  been  made  with 
marvellous  technical  skill.  Hardly  any 
more  profitable  investigation  could  be 
suggested  to  the  'prentice  playwright  than 
first  to  read  one  of  these  novels,  and  then 
to  compare  it  faithfully  with  the  play 
which  its  author  evolved  from  it ;  and  the 
student  of  the  physics  of  play-making 
could  have  no  better  laboratory  work  than 
to  think  out  the  reasons  for  every  change. 
Such  a  student  will  discover,  for  in- 
stance, that  the  dramatist  cannot  avail 
himself  of  one  of  the  most  effective  de- 
vices of  the  novelist,  who  may  keep  a  se- 
cret from  his  readers,  which  is  either  re- 
vealed to  them  unexpectedly  and  all  at 
once,  or  which  they  are  allowed  to  solve 
for  themselves  from  chance  hints  skilfully 
let  fall  in  the  course  of  the  narrative. 
But  the  dramatist  knows  that  to  keep  a 
secret  from  the  spectator  for  the  sake  of 
a  single,  sudden  surprise  is  to  sacrifice  to 
one  little  and  temporary  shock  of  dis- 
covery the  cumulative  force  of  a  heroic 
struggle  against  a  foreseen  catastrophe. 
To  take  an  example  from  one  of  the  most 


accomplished  of  Greek  playwrights,  the 
strife  against  awakening  doubt,  the  wrest- 
ling with  a  growing  conviction,  the  agony 
of  final  knowledge  which  we  see  in  "  CEdi- 
pus,"  and  the  indisputable  effect  these 
have  on  us,  are  the  result  of  not  keeping 
a  secret.  The  great  play  of  Sophocles 
has  the  interest  of  expectation,  though 
every  spectator  might  foresee  and  fore- 
tell the  outcome  of  the  opening  situa- 
tions. True  dramatic  interest  is  aroused, 
not  by  deceiving  or  disappointing  the  au- 
dience as  to  the  end  to  be  reached,  or 
even  by  keeping  it  unduly  in  doubt  as  to 
this,  but  by  choosing  the  least  common- 
place and  most  effective  means  of  reach- 
ing that  end.  And  true  dramatic  inter- 
est is  sustained,  not  by  a  vulgar  surprise, 
but  by  exciting  the  sympathy  of  the  spec- 
tator for  the  character  immeshed  in  dan- 
gers which  the  audience  comprehend 
clearly — by  exciting  the  sympathy  of  the 
spectator  so  that  he  becomes  the  accom- 
plice of  the  playwright,  putting  himself  in 
the  place  of  the  persons  of  the  play,  and 
feeling  with  them  as  the  dread  catastro- 
phe draws  nigh. 


The  novelist  may  play  tricks  with  his 
readers,  because  he  knows  that  they  can 
take  time  to  think  if  they  are  in  doubt, 
and  can  even  turn  back  a  chapter  or  two 
to  straighten  out  the  sequence  of  events. 
But  the  dramatist  knows  that  the  spec- 
tators have  no  time  for  retrospection  and 
for  piecing  together,  and  therefore  he  is 
not  warranted  in  leaving  them  in  the  dark 
for  a  minute.  And  it  is  this  total  diver- 
gence of  principle  that  so  many  novelists, 
and  so  many  of  those  who  attempt  to 
dramatize  novels,  absolutely  fail  to  ap- 
prehend. In  her  needless  biography  of 
Richard  Brinsley  Sheridan,  Mrs.  Oliphant 
found  fault  with  the  screen  scene  of  the 
"  School  for  Scandal  "  because  we  see  Lady 
Teazle  conceal  herself.  "  It  would,  no 
doubt,"  she  wrote,  "  have  been  higher  art 
could  the  dramatist  have  deceived  his  au- 
dience as  well  as  the  personages  of  the 
play,  and  made  us  also  parties  in  the  sur- 
prise of  the  discovery."  This  criticism  is 
simply  a  master-stroke  of  dramatic  in- 
competence, and  it  is  astounding  that 
any  one  able  to  read  and  write  could  con- 
sider that  most  marvellous  specimen  of 


dramatic  construction,  the  screen  scene 
of  the  "  School  for  Scandal,"  without  see- 
ing that  the  whole  effect  of  the  situation, 
and  half  the  force  of  the  things  said  and 
done  by  the  characters  on  the  stage, 
would  be  lost  if  we  did  not  know  tHat 
Lady  Teazle  was  in  hiding  within  hear- 
ing of  Joseph's  impotent  explanations, 
Charles's  careless  gayety,  and  Sir  Peter's 
kindly  thoughtfulness. 

In  a  play  there  must  be  as  little  as  pos- 
sible of  either  confusion  or  doubt.  As 
the  French  critic  said,  the  laws  of  the 
drama  are  Logic  and  Movement — logic  in 
the  exposition  and  sequence  of  events, 
movement  in  the  emotions  presented. 
And  here  we  come  to  another  dissimilar- 
ity of  the  drama  from  prose-fiction — the 
need  of  more  careful  and  elaborate  struct- 
ure in  a  play.  A  novel  a  man  may  make 
up  as  he  goes  along  haphazard,  but  in  a 
play  the  last  word  must  be  thought  out 
before  the  first  word  is  written.  The  plot 
must  move  forward  unhesitatingly  to  its 
inevitable  conclusion.  There  can  be  no 
wavering,  no  faltering,  no  lingering  by  the 
wayside.  And  every  effect,  every  turn  of 


the  story  must  be  prepared  adroitly  and 
unostentatiously.  M.  Legouve  calls  the 
play-goer  both  exacting  and  inconsistent, 
in  that  he  insists  that  everything  which 
passes  before  him  on  the  stage  shall  be 
at  once  foretold  and  unforeseen.  The 
play-goer  is  shocked  if  anything  drops 
from  the  clouds  unexpected,  yet  he  is 
bored  if  anything  is  unduly  announced. 
The  dramatist  must  now  and  again  take 
the  play-goers  into  his  confidence  by  a 
chance  word  to  which  they  pay  no  atten- 
tion at  the  time,  so  that  when  the  situa- 
tion abruptly  turns  on  itself,  they  say  to 
themselves,  "  Why,  of  course,  he  warned 
us  of  that.  What  fools  we  were  not  to 
guess  what  was  coming!"  And  t'hen  they 
are  delighted. 

In  considering  Lord  Tennyson's  "  Queen 
Mary  "  when  it  first"  appeared,  Mr.  Henry 
James  remarked  that  the  "  fine  thing  in  a 
real  drama  is  that,  more  than  any  other 
work  of  literary  art,  it  needs  a  masterly 
structure,  a  process  which  makes  a  de- 
mand upon  an  artist's  rarest  gifts."  And 
then  Mr.  James  compressed  a  chapter  of 
criticism  into  a  figure  of  speech.  "  The 


five-act  drama,"  he  said,  "  serious  or  hu- 
morous, poetic  or  prosaic,  is  like  a  box  of 
fixed  dimensions  and  inelastic  material, 
into  which  a  mass  of  precious  things  are 
to  be  packed  away.  .  .  .  The  precious 
things  seem  out  of  all  proportion  to  the 
compass  of  the  receptacle ;  but  the  artist 
has  an  assurance  that  with  patience  and 
skill  a  place  may  be  made  for  each,  and 
that  nothing  need  be  clipped  or  crimped, 
squeezed  or  damaged."  It  is  this  infinite 
patience  and  this  surpassing  skill  that  the 
ordinary  theatrical  adapter  of  a  novel  is 
wholly  without.  He  does  not  acknowl- 
edge the  duties  of  the  dramatist,  and  he 
is  hardly  conscious  even  that  a  play  is  a 
work  of  literary  art.  Few  of  those  who 
try  to  write  for  the  stage,  without  having 
penetrated  the  secret  of  the  drama,  realize 
the  indisputable  necessity  of  the  prelim- 
inary plan.  They  do  not  suspect  that  a 
play  must  needs  be  built  as  carefully  and 
as  elaborately  as  a  cathedral,  in  which  not 
only  the  broad  nave  and  the  massive 
towers  but  every  airy  pinnacle  and  every 
flying  buttress  contribute  to  the  total  ef- 
fect. As  the  architect,  who  is  primarily 


25 

an  artist,  must  do  his  work  in  full  accord 
with  the  needs  of  the  civil  engineer  who 
understands  the  mechanics  of  building, 
so  the  dramatist,  who  deals  with  human 
character  and  human  passion,  is  guid- 
ed in  his  labor  by  the  precepts  and 
practice  of  the  mere  play-maker,  the  ex- 
pert who  is  master  of  the  mechanics  of 
the  stage.  The  accomplished  architect 
is  his  own  civil  engineer,  and  the  true 
dramatist  is  a  playwright  also,  a  man  fully 
conversant  with  the  possibilities  of  the 
theatre  and  fully  recognizing  its  limita- 
tions. "  To  work  successfully  beneath  a 
few  grave,  rigid  laws,"  said  Mr.  James  in 
the  criticism  from  which  I  have  already 
quoted,  "  is  always  a  strong  man's  high- 
est ideal  of  success."  This  serves  to  ex- 
plain why  the  sonnet  with  its  inexorable 
rules  has  been  ever  a  favorite  with  great 
poets,  and  why  the  drama  with  its  metes 
and  bounds  has  always  had  a  fascination 
for  the  literary  artist. 

Some  of  the  limitations  of  the  drama 
are  inherent  in  the  form  itself,  and  are 
therefore  immutable  and  permanent. 
Some  are  external,  and  are  therefore  tern- 


porary  and  variable.  For  example,  it  has 
always  seemed  to  me  that  inadequate  at- 
tention has  been  given  to  the  influence 
exerted  on  dramatic  literature  by  the  size 
of  the  theatre  and  by  the  circumstances 
of  the  performance.  This  influence  was 
most  potent  in  shaping  the  Greek  drama, 
the  Elizabethan  plays  of  England,  and  the 
French  tragedy  under  Louis  XIV.  The 
unadorned  directness  of  /Eschylus  im- 
presses us  mightily;  the  same  massive 
breadth  of  treatment  we  find  also,  al- 
though in  a  minor  degree,  in  Sophocles 
and  Euripides ;  on  all  three  dramatists  it 
was  imposed  by  the  physical  conditions 
of  the  theatre.  Their  plays  were  to  be 
performed  out  of  doors,  by  actors  speak- 
ing through  a  resonant  mouthpiece  in  a 
huge  mask,  and  lifted  on  high  shoes  so 
that  they  might  be  seen  by  thousands  of 
spectators  from  all  classes  of  the  people. 
Of  necessity  the  dramatist  chose  for  his 
subject  a  familiar  tale,  and  gave  it  the 
utmost  simplicity  of  plot  while  he  sought 
a  gradually  increasing  intensity  of  emo- 
tion. The  movement  of  his  story  must 
needs  be  slow ;  there  was  no  change  of 


scene,  and  there  was  no  violence  of  ac- 
tion. Thus  it  happens  that  the  impassi- 
ble dignity  of  the  Greek  drama  was  due, 
not  wholly  to  the  aesthetic  principles  of 
Greek  art,  but  to  the  physical  conditions 
of  the  Greek  theatre.  The  so-called  rule 
of  the  three  unities  —  the  rule  that  a 
play  should  show  but  one  action  in  one 
place  and  in  one  day,  a  rule  that  later 
critics  deduced  from  the  practice  of  the 
Greeks— was  not  consciously  obeyed  by 
^Eschylus,  Sophocles,  or  Euripides,  al- 
though the  most  of  their  plays  seem  to 
fall  within  it,  simply  from  force  of  circum- 
stances. 

As  different  as  may  be  were  the  large 
and  splendid  open-air  representations  of 
these  great  Greek  dramas  before  the  as- 
sembled citizens  of  a  Greek  state,  and 
the  cramped  and  dingy  performances  of 
Shakespeare's  plays  in  the  rude  theatre 
of  Queen  Elizabeth's  day,  when  the  stage 
was  but  a  small  platform  set  up  at  one 
end  of  the  half-roofed  court-yard  of  an 
inn.  Then  there  was  but  a  handful  of 
spectators,  standing  thickly  in  the  pit  or 
seated  in  the  shallow  galleries  close  to 


the  actors.  The  stage  was  unencumbered 
with  scenery,  and  author  and  actors  felt 
themselves  free  to  fill  it  with  movement ; 
and  so  the  plays  of  that  time  abound  in 
murders  and  trials,  in  councils  and  in 
battles.  The  audience  had  perforce  to 
imagine  the  background  of  the  story,  and 
so  the  authors  did  not  hesitate  to  change 
the  scene  with  careless  frequency.  As  the 
noble  marble  theatres  of  Greece  imposed 
on  the  dramatist  an  equal  severity,  so  the 
mean,  half-timbered  playhouses  of  Eliza- 
bethan England  warranted  the  noisy  vio- 
lence and  the  rushing  eloquence  and  the 
fiery  poesy  which  seem  to  us  to-day  chief 
among  the  characteristics  of  the  dramatic 
literature  of  that  epoch. 

Crossing  the  Channel  to  France,  we 
find  that  the  decorum  and  pseudo-dignity 
of  tragedy  under  Louis  XIV.  are  due,  in 
part  at  least,  to  the  court  plumes  and 
velvet  coats  which  the  actors  wore  even 
when  personating  the  noblest  of  Romans 
or  the  simplest  of  Greeks ;  and  also  to  the 
fact  that  the  stage  was  circumscribed  by 
a  double  row  of  benches  occupied  by  the 
courtiers.  Through  the  ranks  of  these 


29 

fine  gentlemen,  coming  and  going  at  their 
will,  and  chatting  together  freely,  the  Cid 
and  Phedre  had  to  make  their  way  to  a 
small  central  space  where  they  might 
stand  stock-still  to  declaim.  Swift  mo- 
tion and  even  vigorous  gesture  were  im- 
possible. The  wily  Racine  found  his 
account  in  substituting  a  subtle  self-an- 
alytic and  concentrated  psychologic  ac- 
tion for  purely  physical  movement,  a 
choice  consonant  to  his  genius.  On  the 
production  of  Voltaire's  "Semiramis,"  it 
is  recorded  that  an  usher  had  to  break 
through  the  ring  of  spectators  seated  and 
standing  on  the  stage,  with  a  plaintive 
appeal  that  they  would  make  way  for  the 
ghost  of  Ninus.  Under  conditions  like 
these  it  is  no  wonder  that  in  time  French 
tragedy  stiffened  into  a  parody  of  itself. 

The  physical  conditions  of  the  stage 
are  different  in  every  time  and  in  every 
place;  they  are  continually  changing;  but 
the  true  dramatist  makes  his  work  con- 
form to  them,  consciously  or  unconscious- 
ly. The  poet  who  is  not  a  true  dramatist 
seeks  to  model  a  modern  drama  on  an 
ancient — a  fundamental  and  fatal  defect. 


The  attempt  of  Voltaire  to  imitate  Soph- 
ocles was  foredoomed  to  failure.  The 
endeavor  of  many  later  English  poets  to 
use  the  Shakespearean  formula  is  equally 
futile.  Mr.  Stedman  has  shrewdly  point- 
ed out  that  Tennyson's  "  Queen  Mary" 
differs  from  the  work  of  the  Elizabethan 
dramatist  in  that  it  is  the  result  of  a 
"  forced  effort,  while  the  models  after 
which  it  is  shaped  were  in  their  day  an 
intuitive  form  of  expression." 

This  forced  effort  is  really  due  to  a 
misunderstanding  of  the  older  dramatists. 
If  Sophocles  had  lived  in  the  days  of 
Voltaire,  he  would  have  written  in  ac- 
cordance with  the  physical  conditions  of 
the  French  theatre  of  that  era.  If  Shake- 
speare had  lived  in  the  days  of  ^Eschylus, 
he  would  have  produced  Greek  plays  of 
the  most  sublime  simplicity.  Were  he 
alive  now,  we  may  be  sure  that  he  would 
not  construct  a  piece  in  mimicry  of  the 
Elizabethan  dramatists,  as  Lord  Tennyson 
chose  to  do.  He  would  use  the  most 
modern  form  :  and,  incomparable  crafts- 
man as  he  was,  he  would  bend  to  his  bid- 
ding every  modern  improvement — music, 


costume,  scenery,  and  lighting.  Were 
Caesar  and  Napoleon  men  of  our  time, 
they  would  not  now  fight  with  the  short 
sword  or  the  flint-lock,  but  with  the 
Winchester  and  the  Catling. 

This,  I  take  it,  is  one  of  the  chief  char- 
acteristics of  the  true  dramatist — that  he 
sees  at  once  when  a  form  is  outworn,  and 
lets  the  dead  past  bury  its  dead ;  that  he 
utilizes  all  the  latest  devices  of  the  stage, 
while  recognizing  frankly  and  fully  the 
limitations  imposed  by  the  physical  con- 
ditions of  the  theatre.  As  I  have  already 
suggested,  these  limitations  forbid  not  a 
few  of  the  effects  permissible  to  the  nov- 
elist. No  dramatist  may  open  his  story 
with  a  solitary  horseman,  as  was  once  the 
fashion  of  fiction;  nor  can  he  show  the 
hero  casually  rescuing  the  heroine  from 
a  prairie  on  fire,  or  from  a  slip  into  the 
rapids  of  Niagara ;  and  he  finds  it  impos- 
sible to  get  rid  of  the  villain  by  throwing 
him  under  the  wheels  of  a  locomotive. 
Not  only  is  the  utilization  of  the  forces 
of  nature  very  difficult  on  the  stage, 
and  extremely  doubtful,  but  the  descrip- 
tion of  nature  herself  is  out  of  place  ;  and 


however  expert  the  scene-painter,  he  can- 
not hope  to  vie  with  Victor  Hugo  or 
Hawthorne  in  calling  up  before  the  eye 
the  grandeur  or  the  picturesqueness  of 
the  scene  where  the  action  of  the  story 
comes  to  its  climax. 

Time  was  when  the  drama  was  first, 
and  prose-fiction  limped  a  long  way  after  ; 
time  was  when  the  novelists,  even  the 
greatest  of  them,  began  as  playwrights. 
Cervantes,  Le  Sage,  Fielding,  all  studied 
the  art  of  character-drawing  on  the  boards 
of  a  theatre,  although  no  one  of  their 
plays  keeps  the  stage  to-day,  while  we 
still  read  with  undiminished  zest  the 
humorous  record  of  the  adventures  and 
misadventures  of  Don  Quixote,  Gil  Bias, 
and  Tom  Jones.  Scott  was,  perhaps,  the 
first  great  novelist  who  did  not  learn  his 
trade  behind  the  scenes.  It  seemed  to 
Lowell  that  before  Fielding  "real  life 
formed  rather  the  scenic  background  than 
the  substance,  and  that  the  characters  are, 
after  all,  merely  players  who  represent 
certain  types  rather  than  the  living  types 
themselves."  It  may  be  suggested  that 
the  earlier  novels  reflected  the  easy  expe- 


clients  and  artificial  manners  of  the  theatre, 
much  as  the  writers  may  have  employed 
the  processes  of  the  stage.  Since  Field- 
ing and  Scott  the  novel  has  been  expand- 
ing, until  it  seeks  to  overshadow  its  elder 
brother.  The  old  interdependence  of  the 
drama  and  prose -fiction  has  ceased; 
nowadays  the  novel  and  the  play  are  in- 
dependent, each  with  its  own  aims  and 
its  own  methods. 

While,  on  the  one  hand,  there  are  not 
lacking  those  who  see  in  the  modern 
novel  but  a  bastard  epic  in  low  prose, 
so -there  are  not  wanting  others,  novel- 
ists and  critics  of  literature,  chiefly  in 
France,  where  the  principles  of  dramatic 
art  are  better  understood  than  else- 
where, who  are  so  impressed  by  the  num- 
ber and  magnitude  of  the  restrictions 
which  bind  the  dramatist,  that  they  are 
inclined  to  declare  the  drama  itself  to  be 
an  outworn  form.  They  think  that  the 
limitations  imposed  on  the  dramatist  are 
so  rigid  that  first-rate  literary  workmen 
will  not  accept  them,  and  that  first-rate 
literary  work  cannot  be  hoped  for.  These 
critics  are  on  the  verge  of  hinting  that 

3 


nowadays  the  drama  is  little  more  than  a 
polite  amusement,  just  as  others  might 
call  oratory  now  little  more  than  the  art 
of  making  after-dinner  speeches.  They 
suggest  that  the  play  is  sadly  primitive 
when  compared  with  the  perfected  novel 
of  the  nineteenth  century.  They  remark 
that  the  drama  can  show  but  a  corner 
of  life,  while  prose-fiction  may  reveal 
almost  the  whole  of  it.  They  assert 
boldly  that  the  drama  is  no  longer  the 
form  of  literature  best  suited  to  the  treat- 
ment of  the  subjects  in  which  the  think- 
ing people  of  to-day  are  interested.  They 
declare  that  the  novelist  may  grapple  res- 
olutely with  a  topic  of  the  times,  though 
the  dramatist  dare  not  scorch  his  fingers 
with  a  burning  question.  The  Goncourts, 
in  the  preface  of  their  undramatic  play, 
4<  La  Patrie  en  Danger,"  announced  that 
"  the  drama  of  to-day  is  not  literature." 

It  is  well  to  mass  these  criticisms  to- 
gether that  they  may  be  met  once  and 
for  all.  It  is  true  that  the  taste  for  analy- 
sis which  dominates  the  prose-fiction  of  « 
our  time  has  affected  the  drama  but  little  ; 
and  it  is  not  easy  to  say  whether  or  not 


the  formulas  of  the  theatre  can  be  so  en- 
larged, modified,  and  made  more  delicate 
that  the  dramatist  can  really  rival  the 
novelist  in  psychologic  subtlety.  Of 
course,  if  the  novel  continues  to  develop 
in  one  direction  in  accordance  with  a 
general  current  of  literature,  and  if  the 
drama  does  not  develop  along  the  same 
lines,  then  the  drama  will  be  left  behind, 
and  it  will  become  a  mere  sport,  an  empty 
spectacle,  a  toy  for  children,  spoonmeat 
for  babes. 

A  book,  however  fine  or  peculiar,  deli- 
cate or  spiritual,  goes  in  time  to  the  hun- 
dred or  the  thousand  congenial  spirits  for 
whom  it  was  intended  ;  it  may  not  get  to 
its  address  at  once  or  even  in  its  author's 
life-time;  but  sooner  or  later  its  message 
is  delivered  to  all  who  are  ready  to  receive 
it.  A  play  can  have  no  such  fate ;  and 
for  it  there  is  no  redemption,  if  once  it  is 
damned.  It  cannot  live  by  pleasing  a 
few  only ;  to  earn  the  right  to  exist,  it 
must  please  the  many.  And  this  is  at 
the  bottom  of  all  dislike  for  the  dramatic 
form — that  it  appeals  to  the  crowd,  to 
the  broad  public,  to  all  classes  alike,  rich 


and  poor,  learned  and  ignorant,  rough 
and  refined.  And  this  is  to  me  the  great 
merit  of  the  drama,  that  it  cannot  be  dil- 
ettante, finikin,  precious,  narrow.  It  must 
handle  broad  themes  broadly.  It  must 
deal  with  the  common,  facts  of  humanity. 
It  is  the  democrat  of  literature.  The- 
ophile  Gautier,  who  disliked  the  theatre, 
said  that  an  idea  never  found  its  way  on 
the  stage  until  it  was  worn  threadbare  in 
newspapers  and  in  novels.  And  he  was 
not  far  out.  As  the  drama  appeals  to 
the  public  at  large,  it  must  consider  seri- 
ously only  those  subjects  which  the  pub- 
lic at  large  can  understand  and  are  in- 
terested in.  There  are  exceptions,  no 
doubt,  now  and  again,  when  an  adroit 
dramatist  succeeds  in  captivating  the 
public  with  a  theme  still  in  debate.  M. 
Sardou,  for  example,  wrote  "  Daniel  Ro- 
chat"  ten  years  before  Mrs.  Ward  wrote 
Robert  Elsmere,  and  the  Frenchman's 
play  was  acted  in  New  York  for  more 
than  a  hundred  nights.  M.  Alexandre 
Dumas  fils  has  again  and  again  discussed 
on  the  stage  marriage  and  divorce  and 
other  problems  that  vex  mankind  to-day. 


And  in  Scandinavia,  Henrik  Ibsen,  a 
dramatist  of  exceeding  technical  skill  and 
abundant  ethical  vigor,  has  brought  out 
a  series  of  dramas  (many  of  them  suc- 
cessful on  the  stage),  of  which  the  most 
important  is  "Ghosts,"  wherein  he  con- 
siders with  awful  moral  force  the  doctrine 
of  heredity,  proving  by  example  that  the 
sins  of  the  fathers  are  visited  on  the  chil- 
dren. With  instances  like  these  in  our 
memories,  we  may  suggest  that  the  lit- 
erary deficiencies  of  the  drama  are  not  in 
the  form,  but  in  the  inexpertness  or  in- 
ertness of  the  dramatists  of  the  day. 
There  are  few  of  the  corner-stone  facts  of 
human  life,  and  there  are  none  of  the 
crucible-tried  passions  of  human  charac- 
ter, which  the  drama  cannot  discuss  quite 
as  well  as  the  novel. 

Indeed,  the  drama  is  really  the  noblest 
form  of  literature,  because  it  is  the  most 
direct.  It  calls  forth  the  highest  of  liter- 
ary faculties  in  the  highest  degree — the 
creation  of  character,  standing  firm  on 
its  own  feet,  and  speaking  for  itself.  The 
person  in  a  play  must  be  and  do,  and  the 
spectator  must  see  what  he  is,  and  what 


he  does,  and  why.  There  is  no  narrator 
standing  by  to  act  as  chorus,  and  there 
needs  none.  If  the  dramatist  know  his 
trade,  if  he  have  the  gift  of  the  born  play- 
wright, if  his  play  is  well  made,  then  there 
is  no  call  for  explanation  or  analysis,  no 
necessity  of  dissecting  or  refining,  no 
demand  for  comment  or  sermon,  no  desire 
that  any  one  palliate  or  denounce  what 
all  have  seen.  Actions  speak  louder  than 
words.  That  this  direct  dramatic  method 
is  fine  enough  for  the  most  abstruse  intel- 
lectual self-questioning  when  the  subject 
calls  for  this,  and  that  in  the  mighty 
hand  of  genius  it  is  capable  of  throwing 
light  in  the  darkest  corners  and  crannies 
of  the  tortured  and  tortuous  human  soul, 
ought  not  to  be  denied  by  any  one  who 
may  have  seen  on  the  stage  the  "  OEdipus  " 
of  Sophocles,  the  "  Hamlet "  of  Shak- 
spere,  the  "Misanthrope"  of  Moliere,  or 
the  "  Faust "  of  Goethe. 


THE   DRAMATIC   OUTLOOK    IN 
AMERICA 

j)HE  "decline  of  the  drama" 
is  a  phrase  frequently  used 
and  rarely  defined.  It  is  a 
vague  term,  and  many  a 
man  who  employs  it  would 
not  find  it  easy  to  declare  its  exact 
meaning.  More  often  than  not  the  critic 
of  the  acted  drama  is  a  constant  praiser 
of  the  past,  which  he  did  not  see,  and  a 
pert  contemner  of  the  present,  of  which 
he  is  forced  to  see  too  much.  To  our 
surprise,  as  we  study  the  history  of  the 
theatre,  we  find  that  this  has  almost  al- 
ways been  the  case,  and  that  the  drama 
has  almost  always  been  in  a  decline,  just 
on  the  verge  of  dying,  with  barely  strength 
enough  to  draw  its  last  breath.  And  yet 
it  still  lives,  and  it  bids  fair  to  survive  to 
a  ripe  old  age. 

In  seeking  to  find  a  precise  definition 


for  the  phrase  "  decline  of  the  drama  "  we 
may  begin  by  acknowledging  that  it  can- 
not indicate  any  diminution  in  the  popu- 
larity of  the  theatre ;  it  is  within  the  ob- 
servation of  even  the  youngest  veteran 
that  there  is  a  steady  increase  of  play- 
houses and  play-goers.  Nor  does  it  mean 
that  the  theatres  are  any  less  magnificent 
than  they  were,  for  they  have  never  been 
more  commodiously  arranged  or  more 
sumptuously  decorated  than  they  are 
now.  And  in  like  manner  we  may  say 
that  there  has  been  no  falling  off  in  the 
splendor  of  theatrical  spectacle  ;  indeed, 
it  is  often  a  reproach  to  the  modern  stage 
that  it  is  prone  to  sacrifice  acting,  which 
is  the  vital  essence  of  theatric  art,  to 
adornment,  which  is  but  external,  super- 
ficial, and  accidental.  But  this  reproach, 
again,  is  no  new  thing ;  and  it  is  more  than 
two  centuries  since  Dryden,  in  the  pro- 
logue to  "The  Rival  Ladies,"  character- 
ized the  stage  of  his  day  in  a  terse  couplet : 

"You  now  have  habits,  dances,  scenes,  and 

rymes, 

High  language  often — ay,  and  sense  some- 
times." 


There  are  some  who  declare  that  the 
decline  of  the  drama  means  that  there  is 
a  decadence  of  the  art  of  acting.  A  cer- 
tain speciousness  in  this  assertion  there 
may  be.  Since  the  privileges  of  the  pat- 
ent theatres  of  London  were  abolished, 
and  since  the  introduction  of  the  starring 
system,  no  longer  do  we  see  the  best  act- 
ors of  a  country  massed  in  one  or  two 
compact  companies  in  the  chief  city. 
They  are  scattered  here  and  there  through- 
out the  world.  A  great  actor  is  not  con- 
tent with  the  local  reputation  which  satis- 
fied Burbage  and  Betterton.  He  is  ready 
to  put  a  girdle  round  the  earth  in  forty 
weeks,  playing  now  in  London,  a  few 
days  after  in  New  York,  next  week  in 
San  Francisco,  and  a  month  later  in  Aus- 
tralia. But  although  the  leading  per- 
formers of  the  country  cannot  any  more 
be  seen  in  a  single  evening,  there  has 
been  no  falling  off  in  the  histrionic  art. 
Never  has  it  been  finer,  firmer,  richer,  or 
more  varied  than  it  is  now.  Never  have 
there  been  performers  of  greater  skill 
than  there  are  to-day,  either  for  tragedy, 
comedy,  history,  pastoral,  scene  individ- 


able,  or  poem  unlimited.  It  is  idle  to 
call  the  bead-roll  of  the  foremost  actors 
of  our  time;  but  even  the  youngest  play- 
goers have  seen  Booth,  Mr.  Jefferson,  Mr. 
Irving,  Signor  Salvini,  Signora  Ristori, 
Herr  Barnay,  Madame  Sarah-Bernhardt, 
and  M.  Coquelin  —  a  galaxy  not  to  be 
matched  readily  in  the  palmy  days  of 
which  we  hear  so  much  and  know  so  lit- 
tle. There  is  no  scarcity  of  the  best  act- 
ing to-day,  and  the  critic  who  may  choose 
to  deny  »this  assertion  reminds  me  of 
Douglas  Jerrold's  definition  of  a  Conser- 
vative as  a  man  who  refuses  to  look  at 
the  new  moon  out  of  respect  for  that  an- 
cient institution  the  old  one. 

By  a  process  of  exclusion  we  are  thus 
led  to  declare  that  the  decline  of  the 
drama  can  mean  only  that  the  dramatic 
is  no  longer  the  leading  department  of 
literature.  From  the  Elizabethan  period, 
through  the  Restoration  and  the  reign  of 
Queen  Anne,  down  almost  to  the  end  of 
'  the  last  century,  when  Goldsmith  gave  us 
"She  Stoops  to  Conquer,"  and  Sheridan 
brought  out  "  The  Rivals "  and  "  The 
School  for  Scandal " — during  these  two 


centuries  the  drama  was  the  chief  form  of 
literature  in  our  language.  It  is  not  so 
now,  and  it  has  not  been  so  for  nearly  a 
hundred  years.  The  purpose  of  the  pres- 
ent paper  is  to  point  out  certain  of  the 
causes  of  this  decadence ;  and  then  to 
suggest  certain  reasons  why  it  may  fairly 
be  presumed  that  the  period  of  this  decline 
is  at  last  complete,  and  why  we  may  ex- 
pect in  the  near  future  a  revival  of  dra- 
matic literature  among  English-speaking 
peoples. 

Like  every  other  art,  the  drama  has  its 
ups  and  downs,  its  years  of  famine  and  its 
years  of  fulness.  The  undulatory  theory 
is  as  true  of  literary  progress  as  it  is  of 
light  and  of  sound.  One  of  these  recur- 
ring periods  of  depression  in  our  dramatic 
literature  was  coincident  roughly  with  the 
beginning  of  this  century,  but  about  the 
time  when  the  drama  ought  to  have  arisen 
out  of  this  slough  several  causes  com- 
bined to  keep  it  down.  These  causes 
were  chiefly  four — the  development  of  the 
newspaper  in  England,  the  popularity  of 
the  Waverley  Novels,  the  Romantic  revolt 
in  France,  and  the  perfecting  of  the  me- 


chanics  of  play-making  by  Scribe.  Each 
of  these  four  causes  may  be  considered 
briefly  and  in  turn. 

The  first  and  the  least  of  these  was  the 
development  of  the  newspaper.  British 
journalism  began  to  exert  real  influence 
less  than  a  hundred  years  ago,  and  the  im- 
petus of  expansion  did  not  come  until 
early  in  this  century.  A  newspaper  is  a 
slice  of  contemporary  existence ;  it  is  a 
daily  panorama  of  the  life  of  the  world, 
with  its  joys,  its  griefs,  its  slow  setting 
forth  of  the  inevitable,  its  sudden  sur- 
prises, and  all  its  infinite  tragedy.  It 
has  even  been  suggested  that  Shakspere, 
were  he  alive  to-day,  would  be  a  journal- 
ist and  not  a  dramatist.  I  am  not  one  of 
those  who  have  rashly  abandoned  Shak- 
spere to  adore  Bacon,  but  I  can  see  Lord 
Verulam  as  the  editor  of  the  London 
Times  more  easily  than  I  can  see  the 
author  of  "Hamlet."  In  no  exact  sense 
of  the  word  is  the  newspaper  a  competitor 
of  the  play ;  and  yet  the  sudden  extension 
of  journalism  undoubtedly  tended  to  de- 
crease the  public  interest  in  the  drama. 
The  newspaper  called  to  it  not  a  few 


young  men  who  might  otherwise  have 
written  for  the  stage,  at  the  same  time 
that  it  supplied  to  others  the  excitement 
and  stimulus  which  they  had  been  wont 
to  seek  in  the  theatre. 

Almost  contemporaneous  with  the  de- 
velopment of  the  newspaper  was  the  en- 
largement of  the  novel  at  the  hands  of 
Sir  Walter  Scott.  In  the  last  century 
Richardson  and  Fielding,  Smollett  and 
Goldsmith,  had  laid  a  solid  foundation  for 
English  fiction ;  but  it  was  not  until  the 
author  of  Waver  ley  built  up  an  enduring 
monument  by  his  splendid  series  of  ro- 
mances that  the  novel  rose  to  be  a  rival 
of  the  play.  Scott's  instant  triumph  and 
the  all-embracing  popularity  which  fol- 
lowed it  revealed  to  young  men  of  literary 
aspirations  that  the  road  to  fame  and  to 
fortune  might  lie  through  the  publisher's 
shop  rather  than  through  the  stage-door. 
It  is  much  easier  to  write  a  novel  than  it 
is  to  make  a  play ;  and  it  is  very  much 
easier  to  get  a  novel  published  than  it  is 
to  get  a  play  produced  ;  and  so  the  ten- 
dency of  the  young  men  away  from  the 
drama  was  strengthened. 


46 


The  expansion  of  journalism  and  the 
extending  of  fiction  had  a  twofold  effect. 
Both  movements  drew  away  literary  as- 
pirants who  were  possible  producers  of 
plays,  and  who  became  journalists  or  nov- 
elists. And  on  the  other  hand,  from 
among  those  who  would  have  been  play- 
goers there  was  carried  away  a  certain 
portion  able  to  stay  its  liking  for  the 
drama  with  the  accounts  of  fires  and  rob- 
beries, of  murders  and  battles,  which  it 
found  in  the  newspaper,  and  also  a  cer- 
tain other  portion  able  to  satisfy  its  long- 
ing for  the  romantic  and  the  tragic  with 
the  heart-breaking  tales  of  the  novelist. 

Thus  it  came  to  pass  that  there  was  a 
dearth  of  English  dramatists.  Mere  adapt- 
ers, patchers  up  of  other  men's  plays,  hew- 
ers of  wood  and  drawers  of  water  for  the 
daily  needs  of  the  theatre  —  these  there 
were  then,  as  there  are  always.  But  real 
authors,  men  who  had  studied  life  and 
who  could  reproduce  it  on  the  stage,  had 
their  attention  turned  from  the  theatre. 
It  was  at  this  time  in  England  that  the 
divorce  was  first  declared  between  litera- 
ture and  the  drama  —  a  divorce  as  ill- 


advised  for  both  parties  as  the  separation 
of  society  and  politics  from  which  we  suf- 
fer here  in  the  United  States. 

For  a  while  the  absence  of  new  pieces 
did  not  signify,  and  the  theatres  continued 
to  act  the  dramas  they  had  ;  they  revived 
old  comedies ;  they  restored  old  tragedies ; 
they  repaired  the  cast-off  plays  of  the  past. 
John  Philip  Kemble  was  then  at  the  head 
of  the  English  stage,  and  he  had  no  liking 
for  new  dramas.  Charles  Lamb  said  Kem- 
ble held  that  all  the  good  plays  had  been 
written.  Kemble  was  a  great  actor,  and 
it  was  natural  for  him  to  think  that  Shak- 
spere  was  none  too  good  for  his  own  act- 
ing. Yet  it  may  be  doubted  whether  too 
frequent  revivals  of  Shakspere's  plays 
are  signs  of  a  healthy  condition  of  the 
stage — if  it  be  admitted  that  one  of  the 
chief  duties  of  the  theatre  is  to  reflect,  as 
best  it  can,  the  life  of  to-day. 

At  length,  despite  Kemble's  careful 
management,  the  stock  on  hand  was  used 
up,  and  the  public  tired  of  dramatic  rem- 
nants. Then  for  the  first  time  the  void 
in  the  English  theatre  began  to  be  filled 
by  importation  from  abroad — at  first  from 


48 


Germany,  whence  came  "The  Stranger" 
and  "  Pizarro  "  and  other  of  Kotzebue's 
tearful  and  turgid  dramas.  But  the  Ger- 
man supply  was  soon  exhausted,  and  re- 
course was  had  to  the  French.  Until  the 
beginning  of  this  century  the  stage  of 
England  had  been  self-reliant.  It  had 
borrowed  a  play  from  France  now  and 
again,  but  it  had  lent  quite  as  much  as  it 
had  taken.  Few  even  among  professed 
students  of  the  stage  know  that  in  the 
clearing-house  where  international  bor- 
rowings are  recorded  there  is  a  balance  in 
favor  of  the  English  as  against  the  French 
up  to  the  end  of  the  last  century.  For 
instance,  there  were  two  adaptations  of 
"  The  Rivals  "  acted  in  Paris,  and  three  of 
"  The  School  for  Scandal."  But  early  in 
this  century  the  balance  ceased  ;  England 
began  to  borrow  indiscriminately  from 
France ;  and  the  fair  exchange  soon  be- 
came open  robbery. 

As  it  happened,  France  was  able  to 
meet  this  demand.  Its  dramatic  litera- 
ture had  just  burst  the  bonds  which  had 
swathed  it  for  more  than  a  century.  "  Her- 
nani "  had  sounded  his  trumpet,  and  the 


hollow  walls  of  Classicism  had  fallen  with 
a  crash.  The  chill  stiffness  and  the  arid 
discussion  of  the  pseudo-classic  drama 
*had  been  swept  aside  by  the  fiery  ardor 
of  the  Romantic  revolt.  The  tragedies 
of  the  false  Classics,  as  bare  as  a  demon- 
stration in  geometry,  gave  place  to  the 
dramas  of  the  Romantics,  as  full  of  color, 
of  movement,  and  of  passion  as  a  tiger. 
Hugo  and  Dumas  and  their  fellows  found 
a  dead  dramatic  literature  which  was 
nothing  but  words  ;  and  in  its  stead  they 
made  a  living  drama  which  was  chiefly 
action.  These  bold,  vigorous,  captivat- 
ing plays,  made  on  the  model  of  Shak- 
spere  and  of  Scott  in  a  measure,  were 
hardy  enough  to  stand  the  voyage  across 
the  Channel  to  the  land  of  Scott  and 
of  Shakspere.  And  in  due  season  there 
were  few  theatres  in  Great  Britain  or  the 
United  States  where  "  Thirty  Years  of  a 
Gambler's  Life  "  and  "  Lucretia  Borgia  " 
and  "  The  Tower  of  Nesle  "  did  not  see 
the  light  of  the  lamps. 

While  the  Romantics  with  their  fever- 
ish fervor  were  making  over  the  French 
theatre  in  their  own  image,  Eugene  Scribe, 


a  workman  of  surpassing  skill  in  the  low- 
er walks  of  the  drama,  was  engaged  in 
perfecting  the  mechanics  of  play-making. 
Taine  has  told  us  that  the  art  of  play- 
making  is  as  susceptible  of  improvement 
as  the  art  of  watch-making.  Scribe  al- 
most succeeded  in  inventing  a  machine- 
made  play — and  he  did  found  a  factory 
for  play-making.  As  M.  Alexandre  Du- 
mas fils  says,  the  dramatic  art  is  wholly 
an  art  of  preparation  :  no  man  ever  un- 
derstood better  than  Scribe  how  to  pre- 
pare, how  to  twist,  and  how  to  untie  the 
knot  which  is  the  heart  of  a  play.  To 
the  presentation  of  the  story,  to  the  de- 
velopment of  the  central  situation,  Scribe 
was  ready  to  sacrifice  all  suggestion  of 
poetry,  the  study  of  character,  brilliancy 
of  dialogue,  local  color,  style,  and  even, 
if  need  be,  grammar.  His  plays  are  plots, 
and  little  more  ;  and  his  characters  are 
puppets,  into  which  he  has  breathed  only 
enough  of  the  breath  of  life  to  enable 
them  to  fall  easily  into  the  situations 
adroitly  arranged  for  them.  He  might 
lay  the  scene  of  a  comedy  in  France  or  in 
England  or  in  Russia :  there  was  no  touch 


\ 


of  local  color,  no  i 
characteristics.  The  action  of  all  his 
pieces  really  passed  in  a  vague,  unbound- 
ed region  known  to  the  wits  of  Paris  as 
La  Scribte  —  Scribia  —  a  sort  of  Bohemia, 
which  is  a  desert  country  by  the  sea,  and 
in  which  everything  happens  exactly  as 
the  dramatist  wishes.  As  Scribe's  plays 
took  place  in  no  particular  country,  there 
was  no  particular  reason  why  they  should 
not  be  acted  in  any  country.  They  were 
as  appropriate  to  England  or  to  Russia 
as  to  France.  And  so  it  was  :  Scribe's 
comedies  and  the  comedies  of  the  host 
of  collaborators  who  encompassed  him 
about  were  translated  and  transferred, 
altered  and  adapted,  in  every  capital  in 
Europe.  Localized  by  the  translator, 
they  were  often  by  him  presented  as 
original  ;  and  the  habit  has  not  alto- 
gether died  out,  for  within  the  last  ten 
years  a  comedy  has  been  acted  in  New 
York  which  the  authoress  claimed  as  her 
own,  but  which  was  only  an  adaptation 
from  Scribe. 

The  principles  which  Scribe  discovered 
were  turned  to  account  by  certain  follow- 


ers  of  the  Romantic  school,  and  there 
arose  a  band  of  melodramatic  writers  skil- 
ful like  Scribe,  and  pictorial  like  Hugo 
and  Dumas.  Chief  among  these  is  M. 
Dennery,  the  author  of  "  Don  Cesar  de 
Bazan,"  "  The  Sea  of  Ice,"  and  "  The  Two 
Orphans."  The  dramas  of  these  play- 
wrights were  also  adapted,  altered,  and 
stolen  throughout  the  world.  As  Schle- 
gel  used  to  suspect  a  Spanish  origin  for 
every  play  with  an  easy  and  varied  in- 
trigue, so  for  a  while  whenever  we  saw  a 
neatly  constructed  drama,  symmetrical 
and  well  articulated,  we  were  inclined  to 
ask  what  Frenchman  had  had  a  hand  in 
its  making,  unwillingly  and  unwittingly. 
When  the  Romantics  had  made  them- 
selves masters  of  the  French  stage,  and 
when  Scribe  had  elaborated  his  system 
of  dramaturgic  art,  then  and  then  only 
did  the  French  play  go  forth  finally  to 
conquer  the  world.  As  the  scanty  band 
of  English  dramatists,  thinned  by  the 
spread  of  the  newspaper  and  the  growth 
of  the  novel,  surrendered  the  control  of 
the  English  stage,  the  French  were  ready 
to  take  it,  and  for  fifty  years  they  held  it 


with  a  garrison.  For  fifty  years  and  more 
the  literary  quality  of  the  plays  produced 
in  England  rarely  called  for  criticism. 
The  best  pieces  of  this  period  were  the 
"Virginius"  and  "The  Hunchback"  of 
Sheridan  Knowles,  "  The  Lady  of  Lyons  " 
and  "  Richelieu  "  of  Lord  Lytton,  the 
"London  Assurance"  and  "Old  Heads 
and  Young  Hearts  "  of  Dion  Boucicault, 
and  the  "  Masks  and  Faces  "  of  Charles 
Reade  and  Tom  Taylor  —  all  effective 
stage-plays,  no  doubt,  but  artificial,  all  of 
them,  and  almost  free  from  any  vain  at- 
tempt to  represent  contemporary  society. 
In  Emerson's  words,  "  Life  lies  about  us 
dumb ;  the  day,  as  we  know  it,  has  not  yet 
found  tongue."  The  English  stage  did 
not  try  to  give  tongue  to  English  thought ; 
it  was  filled  with  impossible  plays,  in 
which  Gallic  emotion  was  mangled  to  fit 
the  Procrustean  bed  of  the  British  pro- 
prieties. In  the  process  of  decanting  the 
French  drama  into  English  demijohns, 
the  lees  were  shaken  up  and  the  fine  fla- 
vor was  lost,  while  an  effort  was  made  to 
give  body  to  the  French  wine  by  adding 
British  brandy.  The  plays  known  as 


"Peril"  and  "Diplomacy"  are  types  of 
this  bastard  hybrid,  neither  French  nor 
English,  nor  anything  but  mulish  ;  and 
we  may  say  of  this  adapted  drama  what 
the  Western  wit  said  of  the  mule,  that  it 
has  no  pride  of  ancestry  and  no  hope  of 
posterity. 

The  dramatic  decadence  in  England 
which  began  early  in  this  century  has 
continued  wellnigh  to  the  present  time. 
Twenty-five  years  ago  the  drama  in  Eng- 
land was  almost  at  death's  door.  Not 
only  was  there  an  insufficiency  of  Eng- 
lish plays,  but  the  stage  was  treated  with 
contempt ;  play-going  was  unfashionable, 
and  the  theatre  was  disintegrating  from 
lack  of  leaders  and  for  want  of  organiza- 
tion. But  now  a  change  seems  to  impend. 
There  is  a  revulsion  of  feeling  in  favor  of 
the  stage,  and  by  this  dramatic  literature 
will  probably  profit.  The  time  seems 
ripe  for  a  renascence.  Of  the  four  causes 
which  long  tended  to  prevent  this  at  least 
three  are  less  powerful  than  they  were 
half  a  century  ago.  Journalism  may  still 
be  as  attractive  as  ever,  but  prose-fiction 
in  England  is  suffering  from  an  over-sup- 


ply  and  from  the  reaction  which  always 
comes  after  strenuous  effort.  There  are 
now  no  great  British  novelists,  and  the 
British  novel  is  apparently  entering  on  a 
period  of  depression  not  unlike  that  from 
which  the  drama  is  emerging. 

At  the  very  moment  when  the  demand 
for  plays  is  increasing,  the  source  of  sup- 
ply in  France  is  drying  up.  The  Roman- 
tic school  has  been  dead  for  years,  the 
sc'hool  of  Scribe  is  dying,  and  so  is  the 
little  school  of  melodramatists  who  stood 
midway  between  the  other  two.  Rarely 
are  the  new  French  plays  suitable  for  ex- 
port ;  and  the  stock  of  old  French  plays 
is  absolutely  exhausted.  For  the  fifty 
years  in  the  middle  of  this  century  the 
French  dramatists  brought  forth  thou- 
sands of  plays,  emotional  or  amusing,  in- 
tense or  ingenious,  melodramatic  or  farci- 
cal ;  and  of  all  these  thousands  every  one 
which  had  any  possibility  of  success  in 
English  has  been  translated  and  adapted 
again  and  again.  The  vein  is  thoroughly, 
worked  out  now ;  and  although  a  persist- 
ent prospector  may  chance  on  a  pocket, 
it  will  be  but  a  happy  accident. 


The  old  French  plays  are  used  up,  and 
there  are  fewer  new  French  plays  than 
there  were.  The  young  men  who  are 
taking  to  literature  in  France  feel  them- 
selves freer  in  writing  fiction  than  in 
working  for  the  stage.  As  I  have  said 
before,  a  novel  is  easier  to  write  than  a 
play,  and  it  is  far  easier  to  get  before  the 
people.  Quite  recently  the  spread  of 
education,  with  the  consequent  growth 
of  the  reading  public,  has  at  last  made 
the  French  novel  as  profitable  as  the 
French  play.  Thus  it  happens  that  there 
are  not  as  many  promising  young  play- 
wrights in  Paris  as  there  were  ten  years 
ago,  and  not  half  as  many,  perhaps,  as 
there  were  twenty  years  ago.  Not  only 
are  there  fewer  plays  produced,  but  those 
actually  acted  in  Paris  are  far  less  likely 
to  please  the  American  people.  For  one 
thing,  the  French  dramatists  of  to-day  are 
conscious  of  the  realistic  movement  which 
dominates  the  fiction  of  France,  of  Rus- 
sia, and  of  America.  The  younger  play- 
wrights especially  are  aware  of  the  increas- 
ing public  appreciation  of  the  more  exact 
presentation  of  the  facts  of  life.  Now  the 


more  accurately  a  play  conforms  to  life 
as  it  is  in  France,  the  less  available  it  is 
for  performance  in  America.  What  most 
interests  the  play-goer  in  New  York  is 
a  representation  of  American  life ;  he 
does  not  care  to  see  a  comedy  turning 
on  the  niceties  and  conventionalities  of 
merely  Parisian  existence.  As  Realism, 
and  its  younger  brother,  Naturalism, 
gain  in  power  in  Paris,  fewer  and  fewer 
French  plays  will  be  fit  for  the  American 
market. 

The  change  now  to  be  detected  in  the 
French  drama  has  already  been  dwelt 
upon  by  French  critics,  although  of  course 
they  do  not  see  its  effect  on  the  dramatic 
literature  of  the  two  English  -  speaking 
peoples.  The  drama  of  passion,  such  as 
the  Romantics  wrote,  and  the  drama  of 
ingenuity,  such  as  Scribe  devised — both 
admirably  adapted  for  export  —  are  now 
seldom  to  be  seen  on  the  French  stage. 
The  three  chief  French  dramatists  of 
this  second  half  of  the  nineteenth  century 
are  Augier,  M.  Dumas,  and  M.  Sardou. 
The  plays  of  only  one  of  these,  M.  Victo- 
rien  Sardou,  a  disciple  of  Scribe,  are 


brought  out  successfully  in  Great  Britain 
or  the  United  States.  Of  all  the  dramas 
of  M.  Alexandre  Dumas  fils  only  one,  the 
"  Dame  aux  Camelias,"  has  held  the  stage 
in  America,  despite  a  frequent  attempt 
to  acclimatize  others.  And  no  one  of 
the  modern  comedies  of  Emile  Augier — 
the  most  wholesome  and  honest  of  the 
French  dramatists  of  the  day — has  been 
acted-  at  any  one  of  the  leading  theatres 
of  New  York  during  the  score  of  years 
since  I  have  been  a  constant  play-goer. 
Two  plays  of  Octave  Feuillet  have  been 
profitable  in  America,  and  two  only,  the 
"Roman  d'un  Jeune  Homme  Pauvre" 
and  the  "Tentation,"  most  skilfully  adapt- 
ed by  Dion  Boucicault  as  "  Led  Astray." 
Many,  if  not  most,  of  the  French  plays  of 
to-day,  the  serious  dramas  as  well  as  the 
comic  farces,  are  calculated  solely  for  the 
meridian  of  Paris.  They  are  so  Parisian 
that  they  are  not  understood  even  in  the 
French  provinces.  They  are  as  local  to 
the  Boulevard  des  Italiens  as  are  Mr. 
Harrigan's  amusing  pieces  to  Mulligan's 
Alley.  And  it  would  be  as  difficult  to 
transplant  them  to  New  York  as  it  would 


be  to  make  a  French  adaptation  of  "Squat- 
ter Sovereignty." 

Assertions  like  these  are  perhaps  sur- 
prising to  not  a  few  who  have  often  heard 
that  our  stage  still  relies  on  France  for 
its  supply ;  and  it  may  be  well  to  adduce 
a  few  statistics.  There  were  in  1887-8  in 
New  York  four  theatres  having  perma- 
nent companies  and  giving  plays  worthy 
of  serious  consideration.  These  were  Wai- 
lack's,  Daly's,  the  Madison  Square,  and 
the  Lyceum.  In  these  four  theatres  dur- 
ing four  years  (1884-5-6-7)  there  have 
been  acted  adaptations  of  only  eight 
French  plays.  In  1884  "Lady  Clare,"  a 
British  perversion  of  the  "  Maitre  de 
Forges  "  of  M.  Georges  Oh  net,  was  the 
sole  example  of  French  dramatic  art  at 
these  theatres.  In  1885  there  were  acted 
two  versions  of  the  "  Andrea  "  of  M.  Sar- 
dou  ;  another  adaptation  of  the  "  Maitre 
de  Forges  ;"  a  translation  of  the  "  Denise  " 
of  M.Dumas;  and  an  English  play  called 
"  Impulse,"  derived  more  or  less  remotely 
from  a  French  play  called  "  La  Maison 
du  Mari."  In  1886  came  "Our  Society" 
(based  on  M.  Pailleron's  "  Monde  ou  Ton 


s'ennuie  "),  and  "  Love  in  Harness  "  (based 
on  M.  Valabregue's  "  Amour  conjugale  "). 
In  1887  we  had  a  second  arrangement 
of  "  Denise,"  a  version  of  M.  Dennery's 
"  Martyre,"  and  "  In  the  Fashion,"  which 
was  an  adaptation  from  Scribe.  This  is 
the  complete  list  of  the  plays  adapted 
from  the  French  which  were  produced  at 
the  four  leading  comedy  theatres  of  New 
York  during  these  four  years.  And  it 
may  be  added  that  most  of  those  adap- 
tations failed  to  interest  the  public,  and 
that  no  one  of  them  was  a  signal  suc- 
cess— no  one  of  them  was  acted  for  one 
hundred  nights.  I  note  also  that  at  cer- 
tain other  of  the  New  York  playhouses 
where  there  is  no  permanent  company, 
and  where  the  entertainment  is  provided 
by  strolling  stars,  during  the  same  period 
four  other  French  plays  were  produced 
— "  Lagardere,"  "  Mile,  de  Dressier,"  the 
"Chouans,"  and  "Three  Wives  for  One 
Husband."  No  one  of  these  achieved  an 
emphatic  success.  It  is  to  be  recorded 
also  that  in  these  four  years  two  comedies 
by  an  American  author,  Mr.  Bronson 
Howard,  "  One  of  Our  Girls "  and  the 


"Henrietta,"  were  performed  each  for  al- 
most a  whole  season. 

Figures  are  stubborn  arguments,  and 
those  I  have  adduced  seem  to  me  to  show 
that  the  theatres  of  New  York  are  no 
longer  dependent  for  their  plays  on  the 
theatres  of  Paris.  At  least  this  is  the 
extremely  satisfactory  deduction  which  I 
make  from  the  figures.  I  know  that  sta- 
tistics are  edged  tools,  and  that  he  who 
produces  them  is  playing  with  fire.  lean 
do  no  more  than  set  them  down  and  then 
stand  before  them  in  the  humble  attitude 
of  Rufus  Choate  at  the  Italian  opera, 
when  he  said  to  his  companion,  "  Inter- 
pret to  me  this  libretto,  lest  I  dilate  with 
the  wrong  emotion." 

What  is  true  of  New  York  is  not  untrue 
of  London  :  there,  as  here,  the  play  adapt- 
ed from  the  French  is  giving  way  to  the 
play  originally  written  in  English.  How 
great  the  change  is  in  both  cities  could  be 
shown  only  by  a  comparison  with  the  sta- 
tistics of  ten  and  fifteen  years  ago — a  com- 
parison for  which  I  have  no  space  here. 
One  of  the  chief  causes  of  this  gradual 
disappearance  of  the  French  drama  from 


62 


the  English-speaking  stage  is  the  recent 
recognition  of  international  stage-right. 
By  an  absurd  anomaly  the  foreign  novelist 
could  not  control  the  printing  of  his  story 
in  this  country,  while  the  foreign  drama- 
tist could  protect  the  performance  of  his  , 
play.  This  reform  has  been  achieved  in 
America  by  judicial  decision,  and  in  Eng- 
land by  a  treaty  with  France.  It  has  had 
a  double  effect.  First,  the  foreign  drama- 
tist, French  or  German,  now  insists  on  full 
payment  for  his  work,  and  thus  the  Eng- 
lish-speaking dramatist  is  no  longer  forced 
to  sell  his  wares  in  unfair  competition 
with  stolen  goods.  Second,  the  foreign 
dramatist  insists  on  receiving  full  honor 
for  his  work,  and  thus  the  English-speak- 
ing dramatist  is  no  longer  discredited  by 
the  presumption  that  his  play  is  adapted 
from  the  French.  Nowadays  when  a  new 
French  comedy  or  a  German  farce  is  pro- 
duced in  London  or  in  New  York  the 
foreign  author's  name  is  on  the  play-bill, 
and  it  is  also  on  the  check  for  the  royalty. 
The  reason  why  so  many  foreign  plays 
continue  to  be  brought  out  is,  not  far  to 
seek.  It  is  partly  because  a  habit  often 


63 


survives  long  after  the  exciting  cause  has 
ceased,  and  partly  because  the  conduct  of 
a  theatre  is  a  very  ticklish  task,  full  of 
perplexity  and  danger,  which  managers 
try  to  reduce  to  a  minimum.  To  produce 
a  new  play,  absolutely  untried,  is  always 
a  risky  piece  of  business,  for  barely  one 
in  three  makes  a  hit  and  pays  a  profit. 
Those  in  charge  of  theatres  seek  to  avoid 
this  risk,  as  far  as  may  be,  by  buying  plays 
which  have  already  approved  themselves. 
If  the  London  manager  can  get  the  pick 
of  Paris  he  discounts  the  hazard  of  a  new 
drama  by  a  British  author  which  may 
or  may  not  please  the  public.  If  tfre 
New  York  manager  can  secure  a  piece  al- 
ready successful  on  the  British  stage  or 
the  French,  he  is  relieved  from  his  doubt. 
This  reasoning  of  the  manager  is  not  with- 
out weight,  and  there  is  no  harm  done  so 
long  as  he  takes  only  the  best  foreign 
plays;  the  American  people  like  to  "get 
the  best,"  be  it  a  dictionary  or  a  drama. 
But  national  tastes  differ,  and  there  is  no 
certainty  that  the  play  which  succeeded 
in  Paris  or  in  London  may  not  disappoint 
play-goers  in  New  York :  and  of  this  asser- 


64 


tion  American  managers  have  abundant 
proof  every  season,  with  a  resultant  in- 
crease in  the  demand  for  American  plays. 
That  there  is  already  evidence  of  im- 
provement in  the  quality  as  well  as  in  the 
quantity  of  the  plays  written  in  Great 
Britain  and  the  United  States,  I  do  not 
think  any  competent  and  candid  observer 
would  deny.  I  should  not  like  to  be 
forced  to  maintain  the  thesis  that  even 
now  the  average  British  play  is  better^ 
than  the  average  British  novel,  although 
I  am  well  aware  that  the  average  of  the 
British  novel  of  the  past  few  years  is 
low  enough.  But  the  conditions  are  now 
favorable  for  dramatic  development,  and 
I  can  see  signs  of  its  coming.  There  is  no 
need  to  count  noses;  but  I  may  suggest 
that  "  Claudian  "  and  "  Clito  "  are  symp- 
toms of  a  revival  of  the  poetic  drama ;  I 
may  note  that  in  the  "  Lights  of  London  " 
and  in  the  "Silver  King"  there  was  the 
promise  of  a  new  type  of  melodrama, 
effective  and  affecting,  sensational  if  you 
will,  but  natural  also,  and  not  without  the 
ruddy  drop  of  human  blood  which  alone 
gives  vitality  to  the  work  of  the  pen ;  and 


65 

I  may  remark  that  in  the  authors  of 
"  Sweethearts,"  of  "  Forget-me-not,"  and 
of  "  The  Squire  "  there  is  a  little  band  of 
English  playwrights  who  have  proved 
their  possession  of  the  power  to  write 
comedies  as  simple  and  as  direct,  as  in- 
genious in  construction  and  almost  as 
brilliant  in  dialogue,  as  the  comedies  we 
go  to  see  in  Paris  at  the  Gymnase  and  the 
Vaudeville.  It  is  true  that  tradition  tends 
to  keep  up  a  tone  of  hard  glitter  in  the 
speech  of  English  comedy;  the  dramatist 
easily  remembers  that  he  is  a  follower 
of  Sheridan,  and  hence  comes  a  certain 
forced  sparkle,  a  factitious  smartness,  a 
profusion  of  cut-and-thrust  epigram  peril- 
ously near  to  rudeness.  The  persons  of 
the  play  are  prone  to  take  the  liberty  Dr. 
Johnson  allowed  himself,  according  to 
Goldsmith,  who,  in  discussing  the  doctor's 
repartee,  declared  that  whenever  John- 
son's pistol  missed  fire  he  knocked  you 
down  with  the  butt. 

The  signs  of  improvement  in  dramatic 
art,  visible  enough  in  Great  Britain,  are 
to  be  detected  also  in  the  United  States. 
The  Americans  are  a  quicker  people  than 


the  British  and  of  a  more  artistic  temper- 
ament. The  American  novelist  now  sur- 
passes his  rival  across  the  Atlantic  ;  and 
perhaps  the  American  dramatist  will  soon 
attain  to  a  similar  superiority.  It  is  wor- 
thy of  note  here  that  the  inquiry  as  to 
the  Great  American  Novel,  which  was 
frequent  enough  years  ago,  when  we  had 
few  writers  of  fiction,  is  no  longer  heard, 
now  that  we  have  novelists  a  plenty. 
Perhaps  the  search  for  the  equally  myth- 
ical Great  American  Play  will  be  aban- 
doned in  like  manner  when  we  have  as 
many  good  plays  as  we  have  good  nov- 
els. Already  has  the  American  drama- 
tist followed  the  American  novelist  across 
the  Atlantic.  Sooner  or  later  nearly 
every  successful  American  play  is  re- 
produced in  London,  just  as  every  suc- 
cessful British  play  is  reproduced  in  New 
York. 

Lowell  tells  us  that  Dryden's  "  come- 
dies lack  everything  that  a  comedy  should 
have — lightness,  quickness  of  transition, 
unexpectedness  of  incident,  easy  clever- 
ness of  dialogue,  and  humorous  contrast 
of  character  brought  out  by  identity  of 


67 


situation."  All  these  requisites  of  come- 
dy can  be  seen  in  American  novels  and 
in  American  short  -  stories,  and  they  are 
beginning  to  be  discoverable  more  abun- 
dantly in  American  plays.  The  tendency 
of  our  novelists  has  been  towards  subtle- 
ty, delicacy,  and  finish,  while  the  tendency 
of  our  playwrights  has  hitherto  been  far 
too  much  in  the  direction  of  rude  farce 
and  crude  melodrama.  American  come- 
dy when  decorous  was  likely  to  be  dull.  It 
is  barely  twenty -five  years  since  Vanity 
Fair,  one  of  the  earliest  and  sharpest  of 
American  comic  papers,  had  a  sketch  of  a 
dramatic  critic  ordering  a  second  cup  of 
coffee,  and  saying,  "  Make  it  strong,  for 
I'm  going  to  see  an  American  comedy  to- 
night, and  I  must  keep  awake  somehow." 
I  do  not  think  that  nowadays  the  dra- 
matic critic  finds  an  American  comedy  a 
soporific  ;  ancl  I  know  that  the  next  morn- 
ing the  American  dramatist  is  apt  to 
think  the  critic  very  wide-awake  indeed. 
Two  of  the  chief  qualifications  of  the 
dramatist — invention  and  ingenuity — are 
recognized  characteristics  of  our  nation. 
A  sense  of  humor  is  another  quality  not 


to  be  denied  to  us ;  and  our  humor  is 
negative  as  well  as  positive  :  it  can  take  a 
joke  as  well  as  it  can  make  one.  The 
jest's  prosperity  lies  with  the  audience 
quite  as  much  as  with  the  author.  The 
kind  of  humor  which  the  American  most 
relishes  turns  on  character.  What  we 
are  keenest  to  seize  in  a  story  or  on  the 
stage  is  a  touch  of  human  nature.  The 
play-goer,  like  the  reader  of  a  short-story 
in  an  American  magazine,  is  quick  to  rec- 
ognize a  character  which  is  at  once  new 
and  true,  and  he  is  prone  to  pardon  all 
else  for  its  sake. 

It  is  just  a  hundred  years  since  Royall 
Tyler,  afterwards  Chief -Justice  of  Ver- 
mont, wrote  "  The  Contrast,"  the  first  play 
by  an  American  author  which  was  acted 
by  a  professional  company.  This  Ameri- 
can comedy  had  in  Jonathan  the  earliest 
of  a  long  line  of  stage  Yankees,  and  to 
the  performance  of  this  part  by  Wignell 
it  owed  most  of  its  good-fortune.  "  The 
Contrast"  proved  the  possibility  of  put- 
ting the  life  and  the  people,  the  man- 
ners and  the  customs,  of  our  own  coun- 
try on  the  stage,  and  since  then  the  most 


69 


enduring  successes  of  our  theatre  have 
been  plays  of  American  character.  From 
Hackett's  Colonel  Nirnrod  Wildfire  and 
Chanfrau's  Mose  to  the  later  Rip  Van 
Winkle  of  Mr.  Jefferson,  the  Davy  Crock- 
ett of  Mr.  Mayo,  the  Colonel  Sellers  of 
Raymond,  the  Judge  Slote  of  Florence, 
and  the  Joshua  Whitcomb  of  Mr.  Thomp- 
son, the  American  play -goer  has  been 
prompt  to  appreciate  the  presentation 
of  American  character,  however  harsh 
and  inadequate  and  inartistic  might  be 
the  dramatic  framework  in  which  it  was 
to  be  seen. 

It  would  be  impossible  to  deny  that  the 
plays  in  which  these  characters  appeared 
were  often  feeble,  forced,  and  false,  shab- 
by in  structure  and  shambling  in  action. 
Here  we  have  the  weakest  point  in  the 
American  drama.  The  playwright  has 
not  taken  the  trouble  to  learn  his  trade. 
There  is  a  grammar  of  the  dramatic  art 
which  must  be  mastered  like  any  other 
grammar.  The  writer  of  a  comedy  should 
have  so  thorough  a  knowledge  of  the 
conditions  of  the  theatre  and  of  the  me- 
chanics of  play-making  that  when  he  puts 


together  his  plot  he  does  not  need  to 
think  about  the  rules  any  more  than  he 
has  to  recall  the  laws  of  English  gram- 
mar whenever  he  writes  a  letter.  This 
technical  knowledge  should  be  digested 
and  assimilated  until  its  application  is 
absolutely  instinctive.  No  assumption  is 
more  foolish  than  that  a  man  ignorant  of 
the  principles  of  play-making  can  write 
a  play,  and  that  afterwards  a  stage-man- 
ager or  some  other  expert  can  "  fix  it  up  " 
so  that  it  is  fit  to  be  acted.  Of  course  it 
may  happen  that  an  inexperienced  writer 
has  an  intuitive  sense  of  theatrical  re- 
quirements, and  that  he  conforms  to 
them  unconsciously,  but  such  a  case  must 
needs  be  rare.  And  perhaps  this — if  the 
parenthesis  may  be  permitted — this  is 
why  no  man  knowing  the  stage,  no  actor 
and  no  manager,  no  dramatic  author  and 
no  dramatic  critic,  has  ever  been  led 
astray  by  the  heresy  that  Shakspere's 
plays  were  written  by  Bacon  or  by  any 
one  but  Shakspere  himself.  More  often 
than  not  the  novice  is  hopelessly  ignorant 
even  of  the  elements  of  the  art,  and  does 
not  understand  the  simplest  necessities 


imposed  by  the  physical  conditions  of 
the  theatre.  Not  long  ago  I  had  a  play 
sent  to  me  to  read,  in  one  act  of  which 
the  heroine,  running  away  from  home,  is 
pursued  by  her  sister,  who  follows  her 
down  the  street,  and  into  one  of  the  last 
of  a  dozen  little  houses  with  gardens  be- 
fore them.  Just  how  this  long  vista  was 
to  be  shown  on  the  stage  the  author  had 
not  considered.  Nor  did  he  remark  that 
a  change  of  scene  was  necessary  when  he 
caused  the  sister  to  follow  the  heroine 
through  the  garden  into  the  little  house, 
where  a  conversation  began  between  them 
which  it  was  expected  that  the  audience 
should  hear. 

The  best  means  of  diffusing  the  need- 
ful knowledge  of  theatrical  technic  is  col- 
laboration, by  which  the  inexperienced 
writer  who  thinks  he  has  a  subject  for  a 
play  may  secure  the  help  of  the  expert 
who  can  teach  him  how  to  treat  it.  The 
biography  of  Lord  Lytton  has  shown  us 
that  Macready  was  in  reality  part  author 
of  "  The  Lady  of  Lyons,"  and  of  "  Riche- 
lieu ;"  he  was  consulted  at  every  step,  and 
it  was  due  chiefly  to  his  understanding 


of  the  stage  that  the  plays  were  success- 
ful. The  most  promising  of  British  and 
American  dramatists  of  our  day  have 
gone  to  school  to  Scribe  and  to  M.  Sar- 
dou  to  spy  out  the  secrets  of  their  art. 
Like  watch  -  making,  play -making  is  a 
trade  at  which  a  man  must  serve  his  ap- 
prenticeship; and  nowhere  may  his  Wan- 
derjahre  be  more  profitably  spent  than  in 
a  tour  of  the  Parisian  workshops.  Thus 
may  be  acquired  skill  in  construction — 
and  constructive  skill  is  almost  the  first 
requisite  for  the  dramatist,  if  we  accept 
the  assertion  of  M.  Dumas  that  the  dra- 
matic art  is  an  art  of  preparation. 

All  great  dramatists  have  studied  the 
theatre  before  they  wrote  for  it.  Many 
of  them  have  had  a  close  connection 
with  a  playhouse.  Shakspere  and  Moliere 
were  players  themselves,  and  managers 
also,  with  a  personal  interest  in  the  tak- 
ings at  the  door — a  fact  which  forced  them 
to  keep  touch  of  the  public  very  care- 
fully. Their  dramas  act  well :  that  they 
also  read  well  was  a  secondary  consider- 
ation. A  play  is  something  to  be  played  ; 
and  what  is  kindly  called  a  "drama  for 


the  closet "  is  a  contradiction  in  terms ; 
it  is  a  play  intended  not  to  be  played. 
If  a  drama  have  not  the  well-knit  story 
and  the  artful  sequence  of  situation  which 
permit  the  characters  to  reveal  them- 
selves decently  and  in  order,  no  meteor 
flashes  of  poetry,  no  aurora  borealis  of 
eloquence,  can  save  it  from  the  deep 
damnation  of  its  taking  off  the  boards. 
There  is  no  more  frequent  phrase  in  the 
mouth  of  a  manager,  in  returning  a  manu- 
script play,  than  that  it  is  "  well  written," 
or  that  it  has  "  literary  merit ;"  and  no 
phrases  are  falser.  If  the  play  is  not  well 
made  it  cannot  be  well  written,  however 
brilliant  its  dialogue.  If  the  structure  is 
not  sound  and  if  the  characters  are  not 
rightly  contrasted,  there  is  no  "  literary 
merit."  Literature  is  not  fine  writing;  it 
resides  rather  in  the  conception  of  the 
characters  and  in  the  concoction  of  the 
story  than  in  any  elevation  of  language. 
Theophile  Gautier  said  that  the  skeleton 
of  every  good  play  was  a  pantomime. 
The  deaf  and  dumb  can  seize  the  story 
of  "  Hamlet  "  and  enjoy  it.  All  the  At- 
tic salt  in  Athens  would  not  save  the 


tragedy  of  "  CEdipus "  if  its  situations 
were  not  as  artistically  arranged  and  as 
pathetically  effective  as  those  of  "  La 
Tosca,"  M.  Sardou's  latest  one-part  play. 
That  the  drama  is  the  highest  form  of 
literary  endeavor  will  be  denied  by  no 
true  lover  of  Shakespeare  and  of  Moliere 
— the  foremost  figures  of  the  two  great- 
est modern  literatures.  The  drama  is 
not  only  the  highest,  it  is  also  the  broad- 
est of  all  literary  forms  ;  it  appeals  to  the 
plain  people  as  directly  as  to  the  Brahmin 
caste.  A  playwright  must  please  the  pub- 
lic at  large  under  penalty  of  not  being  al- 
lowed to  please  anybody.  A  novel  may 
have  its  thousand  readers  a  year  and  not 
slip  out  of  men's  memories.  But  if  a 
play  does  not  interest  and  hold  and  move 
a  thousand  spectators  night  after  night  it 
is  soon  withdrawn  and  laid  on  the  shelf 
to  be  seen  of  men  no  more,  In  vain  may 
the  dramatist  revolt  at  this  restriction 
and  envy  the  apparent  privilege  of  the 
novelist.  At  bottom  it  is  best  that "  those 
who  live  to  please  must  please  to  live." 
Nothing  is  worse  for  an  artist  than  the 
attempt  to  address  only  the  "  inner  circle." 


The  advice  which  Joubert  gives  to  all 
authors  applies  with  double  force  to  writ- 
ers for  the  stage  :  "  On  doit,  en  ecrivant, 
songer  que  les  lettres  son't  la ;  mais  ce 
n'est  pas  a  eux  qu'il  faut  parler  "  (in  writ- 
ing we  must  remember  that  the  men  of 
culture  are  present,  but  it  is  not  to  them 
that  we  should  speak).  The  dramatist 
must  think  of  the  boy  in  the  gallery  as 
well  as  of  the  young  girls  in  the  boxes. 
There  is  something  wrong  with  the  litera- 
ture which  appeals  only  to  the  few  and 
which  scorns  the  suffrages  of  the  many. 
It  is  a  puny  play  which  is  not  broad 
enough  or  deep  enough  or  human  enough 
to  please  the  great  body  of  play -goers. 
Mankind  at  large  it  is,  and  not  any  acad- 
emy, which  bestows  enduring  fame.  No 
clique  or  coterie  can  give  a  pass  for  the 
long  journey  of  immortality  :  that  can  be 
had  only  by  common  consent,  at  an  elec- 
tion, after  due  discussion,  in  which  every 
man  may  say  his  say,  the  artisan  as  well 
as  the  artist.  The  history  of  literature 
teaches  us  nothing  more  forcibly  than 
that  the  critics  are  as  often  wrong  as 
the  play-goers.  It  was  the  public  which 


flocked  to  Corneille's  "  Cid  "  when  the 
French  Academy  denounced  it  as  incor- 
rect and  contrary  to  the  rules  of  tragic 
poetry. 

.  In  literature,  as  in  government,  I  be- 
lieve in  the  ultimate  wisdom  of  the  ma- 
jority. Of  course  under  a  democracy  the 
people  may  be  carried  away  for  a  while 
by  a  demagogue  in  politics  or  by  a  char- 
latan in  letters,  but  this  is  for  a  season 
only  :  on  a  sober  second  thought  they  act 
as  their  own  Supreme  Court,  and  declare 
their  own  work  unconstitutional.  It  is 
at  once  the  danger  and  the  glory  of  the 
dramatist  in  this  country  that  the  future 
of  his  art  depends  on  the  same  condition 
as  the  future  of  our  institutions — on  the 
enlightened  common-sense  of  the  Amer- 
can  people. 


THE  PLAYERS 


the  interesting  complex- 
ity of  metropolitan  life  there 
comes  a  specialization  of  the 
various  social  organizations. 
There  are  clubs  nowadays  in 
New  York  for  each  of  the  professions  and 
for  each  of  the  arts.  The  lawyer,  the  en- 
gineer, the  electrician,  the  railroad  man 
has  now  a  place  in  the  great  city  where 
he  can  meet  his  fellows  and  talk  shop, 
each  after  his  kind.  Clubs  for  the  allied 
arts  have  been  attempted,  but  with  no 
notable  success.  Literature,  music,  paint- 
ing, and  acting  all  pull  different  ways,  es- 
pecially when  journalism  is  added  as  a 
fifth  wheel  ;  and  the  hardy  vitality  of  The 
Salmagundi  and  of  The  Authors  shows 
the  decisive  advantage  of  unity  of  pursuit 
among  the  members  of  an  association. 
The  times  are  ripe,  therefore,  for  The 
Players  —  the  club  of  the  actor,  of  the 


theatrical  manager,  and  of  the  dramatic 
author.  The  Players  is  the  theatrical 
club  as  The  Century  was  originally  the 
artistic,  but  in  The  Players  the  domina- 
tion of  the  professional  element  is  care- 
fully guarded  in  the  constitution.  Out- 
siders may  be  admitted  freely,  but  a 
majority  of  the  board  of  directors  must 
always  be  chosen  from  the  members  who 
are  actors,  managers,  or  dramatists,  the 
three  divisions  of  the  profession  for  whose 
use  and  behoof  the  club  was  formed. 

Nearly  three  centuries  ago  an  English 
actor,  Edward  Alleyn,  bought  the  manor 
of  Dulwich  and  built  there  the  college 
which  still  exists ;  and  more  than  two 
centuries  ago  an  English  actress,  Eleanor 
Gwynn,  gave  the  land  at  Chelsea  on  which 
stands  the  hospital  erected  through  her  in- 
fluence. Not  a  score  of  years  ago  an  Amer- 
ican actor,  Edwin  Forrest,  died,  leaving 
his  large  professional  earnings  to  main- 
tain a  home  for  those  of  his  craft  who 
should  fall  into  poverty  in  their  old  age. 
These  are  all  noble  benefactions,  but  I 
doubt  if  any  one  of  them  is  more  useful  in 
its  way  than  the  club  founded  only  four 


years  ago  by  an  American  actor,  Ed- 
win Booth,  and  intended  by  him  to  be  in 
some  measure  a  memorial  of  his  father, 
Junius  Brutus  Booth  (one  of  the  foremost 
figures  in  the  history  of  the  American 
stage),  while  at  the  same  time  it  should  be 
the  centre  and  home  of  all  that  is  best  in 
the  American  theatre  of  to-day. 

For  years  Mr.  Booth  had  desired  to  de- 
vote a  proportion  of  his  professional  gains 
to  an  enterprise  of  this  sort,  and  in  the 
summer  of  1887  the  matter  was  thor- 
oughly debated  between  him  and  certain 
of  his  friends,  one  of  whom,  Mr.  T.  B.  Al- 
drich,  made  the  felicitous  suggestion  that 
the  proposed  club  should  be  named  The 
Players.  At  midnight  on  the  last  day  of 
1888,  The  Players,  then  a  hundred  in  num- 
ber, found  themselves  in  possession  of  as 
sumptuous  a  house  as  any  in  New  York. 
Mr.  Booth  had  bought  a  fine  old-fash- 
ioned dwelling,  No.  16  Gramercy  Park, 
and  this  Mr.  Stanford  White  had  trans- 
formed into  a  club-house  of  delightful  un- 
conventionality  and  indisputable  comfort, 
perfect  in  its  most  artistic  decorations,  in 
its  luxurious  furniture,  in  its  ample  equip- 


8o 


ment;  and  this  perfect  club-house  Mr. 
Booth  made  over  to  The  Players  by 
deed  of  gift  at  the  witching  hour  when 
the  clangor  of  many  bells  declared  the 
arrival  of  the  year  1889.  Thus  The  Play- 
ers came  into  being  full -armed  for  the 
struggle  for  existence,  and  not  enfeebled 
by  debts  and  deficiencies.  It  began  as  a 
proprietary  club  of  a  new  sort,  one  in 
which  the  proprietor  generously  present- 
ed to  the  members  a  house  ready  for  oc- 
cupancy, that  every  man  might  at  once 
feel  at  home  in  it. 

Since  the  midnight  when  The  Players 
gathered  about  Mr.  Booth,  before  the 
broad  fire  with  its  blazing  yule-log,  and 
beneath  Sully's  noble  portrait  of  Jun- 
ius  Brutus  Booth,  looking  down  with 
eyes  of  tenderness  and  subtle  pity,  the 
club  has  prospered.  Its  membership  has 
increased  rapidly  until  now  it  includes 
nearly  every  actor  of  reputation,  almost 
all  of  the  scanty  band  of  American  play- 
wrights, and  most  of  the  theatrical  man- 
agers of  New  York,  with  many  from  other 
cities.  The  attendance  at  the  regular 
weekly  suppers,  when  Saturday  night 


stretches  swiftly  into  Sunday  morning, 
often  reaches  as  high  as  sixty  or  seventy. 
The  desire  of  the  founder  of  the  club  is 
in  course  of  accomplishment. 

The  constitution  declares  that  "  any 
male  person  over  the  age  of  twenty-one 
years  shall  be  eligible  to  membership  who 
is  an  actor,  manager,  dramatist,  or  other 
member  of  the  dramatic  profession,  or 
who  is  engaged  in  literature,  painting, 
sculpture,  architecture,  or  music,  or  who 
is  a  patron  or  connoisseur  of  the  arts." 
Those  connected  with  the  dramatic  pro- 
fession are  the  most  numerous  class  in 
the  club  ;  and  they  are  the  most  frequent 
in  attendance,  especially  on  the  midnight 
gatherings  of  Saturday,  when  the  actor 
may  rest,  after  two  performances,  serene 
in  the  consciousness  of  a  clear  forty  hours 
before  him.  The  next  largest  delegation 
is  that  of  the  authors,  painters,  sculptors, 
and  architects — practitioners  in  the  kin- 
dred arts  with  whom  the  player- folk  fore- 
gather gladly ;  as  Mr.  Story  says  in  verse  : 

"Yet  it  seems  to  me 

All  arts  are  one — all  branches  on  one   tree — 
All  fingers,  as  it  were,  upon  one  hand." 
6 


The  mere  outsider  admitted  under  an  elas- 
tic definition  of  "  a  patron  or  connoisseur 
of  the  arts,"  is  in  a  minority,  although 
there  is  no  need  to  accept  Mr.  Story's 
saying  in  prose,  that  an  amateur  is  "  a 
person  who  loves  nothing,"  and  a  con- 
noisseur "a  person  who  knows  nothing." 
Early  in  the  history  of  The  Players  a  ten- 
tative classification  of  its  members  into 
four  divisions  was  rashly  made  by  a  scof- 
fer :  first,  the  Players  proper — actors,  man- 
agers, and  dramatists  ;  second,  the  artists  ; 
third,  people  who  lived  near  Gramercy 
Park  ;  and  fourth,  millionaires.  Of  mill- 
ionaires there  are  perhaps  a  sparse  dozen 
on  the  rolls  of  the  club,  but  it  is  a  rarity 
to  see  one  within  the  doors.  There  are 
also  two  or  three  clergymen  among  The 
Players,  including  Bishop  Potter  and  the 
Rev.  Dr.  Houghton,  of  the  "  Little  Church 
Around  the  Corner,"  who  may  be  called 
the  chaplain-in-ordinary  to  the  profes- 
sion, and  whose  request  for  the  closing  of 
the  theatres  on  Good  Friday  night  has 
been  acted  upon  by  many  of  the  mana- 
gers. 

In    the   ample  hall   is  a  large   marble 


83 

mantelpiece,  and  on  the  bricks  of  the  fire- 
place beneath  it  is  inscribed  this  quota- 
tion, written  by  the  founder  of  the  club  : 

Good  frende  for  friendship's  sake  forbeare 
To  utter  what  is  gossipt  heare 

In  social  chatt,  lest,  unawares, 
Thy  tonge  offende  thy  fellowe  plaiers. 

Opening  out  of  this  hall  is  an  inviting 
reading-room,  with  an  upper  alcove  for 
writing-desks.  It  is  from  the  steps  of 
this  alcove  that  one  can  get  the  best  view 
of  the  portrait  of  Mr.  Booth,  framed  over 
the  fireplace  of  the  reading-room.  This 
picture  was  presented  to  The  Players  by 
Mr.  E.  C.  Benedict.  It  was  painted  by 
Mr.  John  S.  Sargent,  and  it  is  one  of  the 
most  brilliant,  vigorous,  and  vivid  por- 
traits of  the  nineteenth  century.  It  is  a 
full  -  length,  and  it  represents  Mr.  Booth 
standing  negligently  before  the  yule-log 
of  the  hall,  much  as  he  stood  on  the  night 
when  he  gave  the  house  to  the  club.  His 
attitude  is  easy,  and  the  countenance  is 
lighted  by  the  kindly  smile  so  often  seen 
upon  the  face  of  the  tragedian.  What 
most  endears  this  picture  to  The  Players 


84 


is  that  it  is  a  portrait,  not  of  the  actor 
merely,  but  rather  of  Mr.  Booth  himself, 
as  he  is  known  to  his  fellow-members. 

Between  the  fireplace  and  the  window 
hangs  Mr.  J.  Alden  Weir's  fine  portrait  of 
the  late  John  Gilbert,  the  first  of  The 
Players  to  die  after  the  club  was  opened. 
Below  this  is  a  portrait  (by  Zoffany)  of 
David  Garrick  as  Abel  Drugger  in  Ben 
Jonson's  play,  now  no  longer  acted.  On 
the  other  side  of  the  room  is  another 
picture  of  Garrick  by  Sir  Joshua  Rey- 
nolds, set  off  by  a  George  Frederick 
Cooke  by  Sully  and  one  of  Naegle's  por- 
traits of  Edmund  Kean.  Elsewhere  in 
the  reading-room  are  a  portrait  of  E.  A. 
Sothern  by  Mr.  W.  P.  Frith,  one  of  Thom- 
as Apthorpe  Cooper  by  Gilbert  Stuart 
(presented  by  the  actor's  daughter),  and 
one  of  Robert  Palmer  by  Gainsborough. 

In  the  great  central  hall  hangs  a  he- 
roic picture  of  Mr.  Booth  in  the  character 
of  Richelieu,  painted  by  the  Hon.  John 
Collier,  and  on  the  other  side  of  the  fire- 
place an  excellent  replica  of  Sir  Thomas 
Lawrence's  painting  of  John  Philip  Kem- 
ble  as  Hamlet.  On  the  opposite  side  of 


the  room  hang  two  of  Sargent's  pictures 
—one  of  Mr.  Joseph  Jefferson  in  the  char- 
acter of  Dr.  Pangloss,  the  other  of  Law- 
rence Barrett  in  his  every-day  dress.  Here 
also  are  a  portrait  of  Mrs.  G.  H.  Gilbert 
by  Mrs.  Dora  Wheeler  Keith,  and  one  of 
W.  J.  Florence  as  Sir  Lucius  OTrigger  by 
Mr.  Carroll  Beckwith. 

Between  the  hall  and  the  dining-room 
are  huge  safes  to  hold  the  relics  and  the 
stray  curiosities  which  are  beginning  to 
accumulate.  The  treasures  stored  up  do 
not  as  yet  rival  those  in  the  Green  Vaults 
of  Dresden.  Though  one  may  seek  here 
in  vain  for  a  wheel  of  the  chariot  of  Thes- 
pis,  for  the  mask  of  Aristophanes,  for  the 
holograph  manuscript  of  a  missing  come- 
dy by  Menander,  for  the  buskin  worn  by 
Roscius,  and  for  a  return  check  to  the 
theatre  at  Herculaneum,  still  there  are 
not  a  few  curiosities  almost  as  curious  as 
these.  There  is  the  sword  Frederick 
Lemaitre  drew  in  the  last  act  of  "  Ruy 
Bias."  There  is  the  crooked  staff  where- 
on Charlotte  Cushman  leaned  as  Meg 
Merrilies,  when  she  foretold  the  fate  of 
Guy  Mannering.  There  is  the  blond  wig 


which  Fechter  chose  to  wear  as  Hamlet, 
perhaps  the  most  chattered  about  of  all 
theatrical  wigs ;  that  it  is,  in  reality,  red 
and  not  at  all  blond  is  not  surprising  to 
those  who  have  mused  on  the  unrealities 
of  life,  as  Hamlet  himself  was  wont  to  do. 
There  is  a  ring  that  once  belonged  to 
David  Garrick,  and  a  lock  of  hair  that 
once  belonged  to  Edmund  Kean.  There 
is  a  spring  dagger,  formerly  the  property 
of  Edwin  Forrest,  the  blade  of  which  kind- 
ly retired  within  the  hilt  when  the  owner 
went  through  the  motions  of  stabbing 
himself.  There  is  a  crucifix  used  by  Sig- 
nora  Ristori  in  the  character  of  Sor  Te- 
resa. Here  also  are  the  second,  third,  and 
fourth  folios  of  Shakespeare's  works,  the 
first  folio  of  Beaumont  and  Fletcher's,  the 
first  folio  of  Ben  Jonson,  and  the  first  of 
Sir  William  Davenant  with  an  autograph 
poem.  Here  are  many  autographs  of  high 
theatrical  interest.  Here,  finally,  are  cer- 
tain stately  pieces  of  silver,  among  them 
a  salver  and  pitcher  presented  in  1828  to 
Junius  Brutus  Booth,  and  the  loving-cup 
presented  to  William  Warren  a  few  years 
before  he  died. 


87 


Here  and  there  throughout  the  house 
are  to  be  seen  Shaksperian  mottoes,  even 
in  the  most  unexpected  places.  That 
which  adorns  one  of  the  mantelpieces  in 
the  grill-room  is,  "  Mouth  it,  as  many  of 
our  Players  do."  It  is  into  this  grill-room 
that  the  passage  opens  which  the  safes 
with  the  relics  guard  on  either  hand.  The 
grill-room  extends  the  full  width  of  the 
house,  and  it  has  a  broad  piazza,  whereon 
the  tables  are  set  on  pleasant  summer 
days,  that  the  members  may  lunch  and 
dine  in  the  open  air.  This  grill-room, 
with  its  oaken  beams  overhead,  its  high 
wainscot,  its  branching  silver  candelabra 
skilfully  adapted  to  the  electric  light,  its 
novel  chandelier  of  silver-mounted  stag- 
horns,  its  blue  tiled  fireplaces  at  either 
end,  its  restful  vista  of  a  green  garden  be- 
yond, its  framed  play-bills,  and  its  many 
portraits,  beneath  which  the  walls  are  al- 
most hidden,  is  the  most  beautiful  room 
in  the  house  and  the  most  original. 

It  is  seen  to  best  advantage  on  Ladies' 
Day.  The  Players  have  but  two  annual 
feasts :  one  is  Founder's  Night,  when  the 
members  assemble  on  New-year's  Eve  at 


88 


midnight  in  commemoration  of  the  open- 
ing of  the  club  on  the  first  day  of  1889; 
and  the  other  is  Ladies'  Day,  when  the 
wives  and  daughters  of  members  are 
made  welcome ;  this  is  on  the  afternoon 
of  Shakspere's  birthday,  the  23d  of  April. 
Then  is  the  grill-room  in  its  glory,  with 
the  fair  greenery  of  spring  outside,  with 
deep  red  roses  on  every  table,  with  the 
moving  groups  of  the  ladies  eager  for  the 
annual  inspection  of  the  paradise  from 
which  they  are  barred  on  every  other  day 
in  the  year.  Such  a  gathering  of  beauti- 
ful and  distinguished  women  as  is  seen  on 
Ladies'  Day  at  The  Players  is  a  rare  sight 
even  in  New  York. 

From  the  evening  when  the  club-house 
opened  its  doors,  The  Players  have  been 
well  bestowed.  On  that  first  New-year's 
Eve,  though  the  paint  was  scarce  dry,  so 
delicate  had  been  the  taste  and  so  adroit 
the  skill  of  the  decorator,  the  house  had 
no  offensive  air  of  raw  newness.  It  ap- 
peared to  be  mellow  from  the  very  begin- 
ning ;  and  as  the  members  for  the  first 
time  entered  into  their  own,  they  found  a 
fire  crackling  cheerfully  in  many  a  fire- 


place,  pictures  peopling  the  walls,  and 
books  ready  to  the  hand,  just  as  though 
the  club  had  been  in  existence  for  years. 
The  books  and  a  majority  of  the  pict- 
ures are  in  the  room  which  serves  as  li- 
brary and  as  the  chief  portrait  gallery.  It 
is  a  long  room,  occupying  most  of  the 
second  floor.  The  bookcases  rise  to  the 
height  of  a  man's  head,  and  the  books  are 
ready  to  the  hand.  From  the  walls  above 
the  portraits  of  the  great  actors  and  ac- 
tresses of  the  past  look  down  upon  their 
successors  of  the  present.  It  was  the  in- 
tent of  the  founder  that  the  home  of  The 
Players  should  be  a  centre  of  light  and  a 
haven  of  rest  for  the  active  members  of 
his  profession.  Here  in  the  library,  with 
its  inviting  arm-chairs,  and  its  atmosphere 
of  repose,  one  may  keep  the  best  of  good 
company — that  of  the  silent  friends  of  the 
past  which  stand  on  the  shelves  on  all 
sides  rejecting  no  advances.  It  is  an  oasis 
where  the  most  active  of  us  may  gladly 
loaf  and  invite  his  soul.  "  There  were 
times,"  wrote  Thoreau,  recalling  his  so- 
journ at  Walden,  "  when  I  could  not  af- 
ford to  sacrifice  the  bloom  of  the  present 


moment  to  any  work,  whether  of  the  head 
or  of  the  hands :  I  love  a  broad  margin 
to  my  life." 

In  the  oaken  cases  which  stretch  from 
one  fireplace  to  the  other  is  the  private 
collection  of  Mr.  Booth,  the  working  li- 
brary of  a  Shaksperian  tragedian.  Be- 
yond and  between  the  farther  mantel- 
piece and  the  rear  window  is  a  major  part 
of  the  theatrical  collection  of  Lawrence 
Barrett ;  and  opposite  are  the  dramatic 
books  of  John  Gilbert,  a  welcome  gift 
from  his  widow.  Other  friends  have  filled 
most  of  the  other  shelves ;  and  the  gath- 
ering grows  apace.  Among  the  treasures, 
for  example,  is  a  collection  of  some  thirty 
thousand  play-bills,  and  over  a  hundred 
volumes  of  original  editions  of  the  elder 
dramatists,  presented  by  Mr.  Daly.  In  a 
shrine  over  a  cabinet  are  half  a  dozen 
death-masks,  from  the  unequalled  collec- 
tion of  Mr.  Laurence  Hutton  ;  and  thus 
we  may  see  how  the  author  of  "  The 
School  for  Scandal "  looked  after  he  had 
departed  this  life,  and  the  author  of 
"  Faust,"  and  the  author  of  "  The  Rob- 
bers." There  .are  death  -  masks  also  of 


David  Garrick  and  of  Edmund  Kean,  of 
Marie  Malibran  and  of  Ludwig  Devri- 
ent,  of  Boucicault  and  of  Lawrence  Bar- 
rett, sad  memorials  of  departed  beauty, 
genius,  and  power. 

Above  the  shelves  where  the  dust  set- 
tles on  their  biographies  and  on  the  com- 
edies and  the  tragedies  they  acted,  are 
the  portraits  of  the  players  of  the  past. 
No  other  collection  of  theatrical  pictures 
approaches  this  in  extent  or  in  importance 
save  that  of  the  Garrick  Club  in  London. 
As  the  gallery  of  the  Garrick  was  begun 
by  the  purchase  of  the  pictures  got  to- 
gether by  Charles  Mathews,  so  that  of 
The  Players  had  its  germ  in  the  portraits 
gathered  by  Mr.  John  Sleeper  Clarke,  a 
comedian  who  has  acted  with  abundant 
success  more  than  one  of  Mathews's  char- 
acters. To  the  small  collection  of  his 
brother-in-law,  Mr.  Booth  added  many 
others ;  and  since  the  club  has  opened, 
and  since  the  fact  has  become  known  that 
it  will  gladly  accept  and  care  for  portraits 
of  actors,  not  a  few  have  been  presented, 
as  always  happens  when  the  public  is 
aware  that  gifts  of  this  sort  are  welcome. 


The  twoscore  and  more  portraits  in  the 
library  are  all  theatrical  in  their  subjects 
— except  that  there  is  here  a  picture 
(supposed  to  be  by  Rembrandt  Peale)  of 
George  Washington,  who,  under  George 
III.,  was  the  active  leader  of  his  majesty's 
opposition.  It  was  for  this  painting  that 
Mr.  Aldrich  suggested  the  properly  the- 
atrical legend,  "  Our  Leading  Man." 

Among  these  pictures  there  are,  as  all 
dramatic  collectors  will  be  pleased  to 
learn,  at  least  a  dozen  of  the  portraits 
painted  by  Naegle  to  be  engraved  for  the 
Lopez  and  Wemyss  series  of  plays — Char- 
lotte and  John  Barnes,  for  example,  Mr. 
and  Mrs.  Francis,  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Duff,  Wil- 
son, Wood,  and  Kean.  There  is  also  a 
portrait  of  Kean  by  Naegle,  painted  at  a 
single  sitting,  so  the  story  goes,  and  under 
peculiar  circumstances.  Some  admirers 
of  the  actor  wanted  him  to  sit  to  the  art- 
ist for  a  picture  as  Richard  III.,  but  he 
refused  repeatedly.  At  last  they  invited 
Kean  to  supper  after  the  play,  and  made 
him  acquainted  with  Naegle,  to  whom  he 
took  a  fancy  before  the  feast  was  half 
over.  When  urged  again  to  let  the  artist 


paint  his  portrait  as  the  crookback,  the 
actor  craftily  consented  to  pose  at  once, 
if  the  painter  had  his  instruments  and  if 
he  had  his  costume.  Now  these  neces- 
saries were  secretly  in  readiness,  Naegle 
having  provided  against  good  -  fortune, 
and  his  friends  having  bribed  Kean's 
dresser  to  be  in  attendance  with  the  royal 
robes  and  plumes.  So  it  is  that  Richard 
III.  gazes  down  on  us  now  a  little  un- 
steadily, as  though  flushed  with  wine 
rather  than  with  victory. 

It  was  before  this  portrait  of  Kean  that 
Mr.  Joseph  Jefferson  placed  himself  one 
evening  when  he  had  a  night  off  and 
wished  to  rest.  He  helped  himself  to  a 
biography  of  Kean  from  the  shelf,  and  he 
settled  himself  down  in  an  easy-chair ; 
and  there  he  read  for  two  hours  or  more, 
glancing  up  now  and  again  from  the 
printed  page,  where  the  story  of  the  way- 
ward actor's  life  was  told,  to  the  painted 
canvas  from  which  the  man  smiled  back 
in  full  enjoyment  of  existence.  Down  in 
the  grill-room  there  hangs  a  broad  play- 
bill of  Drury  Lane  Theatre  announcing 
that  David  Garrick  would  play  Hamlet 


on  Wednesday,  February  10,  1773;  and 
there  below  the  name  of  Garrick  is  the 
name  of  Mr.  Jefferson,  who  is  set  down  to 
play  the  King.  The  Joseph  Jefferson 
who  now  delights  us  as  Bob  Acres  once 
pointed  with  pride  to  this  play-bill,  and 
remarked  that  the  Joseph  Jefferson  who 
played  with  Garrick  was  his  great-grand- 
father. 

Among  the  other  portraits  in  oil  which 
fill  the  library  and  overflow  out  upon  the 
staircase  hall  are  those  of  Charles  Mayne 
Young,  Edwin  Forrest,  Mrs.  Nesbit,  and 
James  Wallack  by  Middleton,  of  Henry 
Wallack  by  Inman,  of  E.  S.  Connor  and 
R.  C.  Maywood  by  Sully,  and  of  John 
Howard  Payne  by  Wright.  In  the  pri- 
vate dining-room,  which  is  on  the  same 
floor  as  the  library,  there  are  half  a  dozen 
landscapes,  two  of  them  being  scenes 
in  Louisiana,  painted  by  Mr.  Jefferson. 
From  the  windows  of  this  private  dining- 
room  may  be  had  a  grateful  glimpse  of 
the  grass  and  the  shrubbery  of  the  shaded 
garden  of  the  Tilden  Library  next  door. 
"  The  country  is  lyric,"  said  Longfellow — 
<(  the  town  dramatic  " ;  and  of  necessity 


95 

the  theatre  is  urban,  but  The  Players  are 
fortunate  in  catching  a  breath  of  rusticity 
from  Gramercy  Park  in  front,  and  from 
the  quiet  gardens  behind.  In  other  re- 
spects, the  club-house  is  much  like  other 
club-houses  ;  it  is  seemly  and  comfortable, 
restful  and  satisfactory.  It  is  interesting 
in  itself,  and  for  what  it  contains,  and  for 
those  who  frequent  it.  It  is  a  place  to 
delight  all  who  can  echo  Horace  Wai- 
pole's  assertion  :  "  I  do  not  love  great 
folks  till  they  have  pulled  off  their  bus- 
kins and  put  on  their  slippers ;  because  I 
do  not  care  sixpence  for  what  they  would 
be  thought,  but  for  what  they  are." 


CHARLES  LAMB  AND  THE  THEATRE 

AMERICANS  take  a  peculiar 
delight  in  the  humor  of 
Charles  Lamb,  for  he  is  one 
of  the  foremost  of  Amer- 
ican humorists.  On  the  roll 
which  is  headed  by  Benjamin  Franklin, 
and  on  which  the  latest  signatures  were 
made  by  Mark  Twain  and  Mr.  Bret 
Harte,  no  name  shines  more  brightly  than 
Lamb's.  By  the  captious  it  may  be  ob- 
jected that  he  was  not  an  American  at 
all ;  but  surely  this  should  not  be  remem- 
bered to  his  discredit — it  was  a  mere  ac- 
cident of  birth.  Elia  could  have  taken 
out  his  naturalization  papers  at  any  time. 
It  is  related  that  once  a  worthy  Scotch- 
man, commenting  on  the  well-known  fact 
that  all  the  greatest  British  authors  had 
come  from  the  far  side  of  the  Tweed,  and 
citing  in  proof  thereof  the  names  of  Burns 
and  Byron  and  Scott,  was  met  by  the 


query  whether  Shakspere  was  a  Scotch- 
man also.  Reluctantly  enough  it  was 
acknowledged  that  he  was  not — although 
he  had  parts  not  unworthy  of  that  honor. 
So  it  is  with  Charles  Lamb.  He  was  an 
Englishman;  nay,  more,  a  cockney  —  in- 
deed, a  cockney  of  the  strictest  sect;  but 
he  had  parts  not  unworthy  of  American 
adoption.  He  had  humor,  high  and  dry, 
like  that  which  England  is  wont  to  import 
from  America  in  the  original  package.  At 
times  this  humor  has  the  same  savor  of  ir- 
reverence towards  things  held  sacred  by 
commonplace  humanity.  Charles  Lamb 
never  hesitated  to  speak  disrespectfully 
of  the  equator,  and  he  was  forever  gird- 
ing at  the  ordinary  degrees  of  latitude. 
His  jests  were  as  smooth  as  they  seemed 
reckless.  He  had  a  gift  of  imperturbable 
exaggeration ;  his  inventive  mendacity 
was  beyond  all  praise;  he  took  a  proper 
pride  in  his  ingenious  fabrications  —  and 
these  are  all  characteristics  of  the  humor 
to  be  found  freely  along  the  inlets  and  by 
the  hills  of  New  England  and  on  the 
prairies  and  in  the  sierras  of  the  boundless 
West.  He  had  a  full  sense  of  his  high 

7 


standing  as  a  matter-of-lie  man.  More- 
over, he  had  a  distaste  for  the  straight 
way  and  the  broad  road,  and  he  had  a 
delight  in  a  quiet  tramp  along  the  by- 
path which  pleased  him  personally  —  a 
quality  relished  in  a  new  country,  where 
a  man  may  blaze  out  a  track  through  the 
woods  for  himself,  and  where  academic 
and  even  scholastic  methods  have  hard 
work  to  hold  their  own.  Even  his  mer- 
cantile training,  in  so  far  as  it  might  be 
detected,  was  in  his  favor  in  a  land  whose 
merchants  are  princes.  And  behind  the 
mask  were  the  features  of  a  true  man — 
shrewd,  keen,  and  quick  in  his  judgments ; 
one  who  might  make  his  way  in  the  New 
World  as  in  the  Old.  There  is  something 
in  the  man,  as  in  the  writer,  which  lets 
him  keep  step  to  a  Yankee  tune.  Words- 
worth wrote : 

"And  you  must  love  him  ere  to  you 
He  will  seem  worthy  of  your  love." 

The  Americans  loved  Lamb  early,  as  they 
did  Praed  and  Austin  Dobson  —  to  name 
two,  as  dissimilar  as  may  be,  of  the  many 
British  wrriters  who  have  found  their  first 


full  appreciation  across  the  Atlantic. 
Charles  Lamb's  only  acted  play  met  in 
America  a  far  different  fate  from  that 
which  befell  it  in  England  ;  and  I  have  a 
notion  that  his  writings  were  aforetime, 
and  are  to-day,  more  widely  read  in  these 
United  States  than  in  Great  Britain. 

"  Truly  was  our  excellent  friend  of  the 
genuine  line  of  Yorick,"  said  Leigh  Hunt; 
and  although  the  phrase  is  not  altogether 
happy,  it  serves  to  recall  two  of  Lamb's 
chief  characteristics — his  humor,  and  his 
love  of  the  stage  in  general  and  of  Shak- 
spere  in  particular.  That  Lamb  was  fond 
of  the  theatre  admits  of  no  dispute, 
though  he  was  wont  to  chide  his  mistress 
freely.  For  Shakspere  he  had  an  affec- 
tion as  deep  as  it  was  broad.  Whenever 
these  two  passions  crossed  each  other, 
the  theatre  must  needs  to  the  wall — as  in 
the  suggestive  and  paradoxical  essay,  "On 
the  Tragedies  of  Shakspere,  considered 
with  Reference  to  their  Fitness  for  Stage 
Representation."  Yet  that  essay  yields 
in  charm  to  Elia's  delightful  papers  :  "On 
Some  of  the  Old  Actors,"  "  On  the  Act- 
ing of  Munden,"  and  "On  the  Artificial 


Comedy  of  the  Last  Century."  This  last 
essay  it  was  which  Macaulay  thought 
worth  while  to  refute  solemnly  and  at 
length.  I  have  an  idea  that  if  Lamb 
could  have  read  this  posthumous  refuta- 
tion, he  would  have  longed  to  get  his 
hands  on  Macaulay's  bumps  to  examine 
his  phrenological  development. 

Lamb's  humor  has  an  Oriental  extrav- 
agance to  be  expected  in  one  who  signed 
himself  "Of  the  India  House;"  but  his 
phrase  had  always  a  clerkly  and  clean- 
shaven precision  not  a  little  deceptive. 
In  him,  as  in  any  other  humorist,  unusual 
allowance  must  be  made  for  the  personal 
equation.  A  humorist  sees  things  as  no 
one  else  does.  He  notes  a  tiny  truth,  and 
he  likes  it,  and  straightway  he  raises  it  to 
the  nth,  and,  lo !  it  is  a  paradox.  He  never 
meant  seriously  that  the  Restoration  Com- 
edies are  sound  and  wholesome  works,  as 
refreshing  in  their  austere  morality  as  the 
Fathers.  Nor  does  he  believe  that  it  is  a 
sin  to  set  Shakspere's  plays  on  the  stage, 
though  a  simple-minded  reader  might 
think  so.  The  light  plays  of  Wycherley 
and  of  Farquhar  did  not  offend  Charles 


Lamb,  and  the  wit  delighted  him.  To 
him  the  comedies  of  Shakspere  lost 
somewhat  of  their  range  and  elevation 
when  seen  across  the  footlights  of  the 
stage.  A  true  lover  of  Shakspere  from 
his  youth  up,  he  could  see  more  in  his 
mind's  eye  than  the  most  lavish  and 
learned  of  stage-managers  could  give  him. 
But  there  are  relatively  few  students  of 
Shakspere,  and  the  mass  of  common 
humanity  had  no  mind's  eye ;  it  can  see 
only  with  the  eye  of  the  body,  and  if  its 
sluggish  imagination  is  to  stir  at  all  it 
must  be  moved  by  physical  means.  In 
the  theatre  alone  is  found  the  sovran 
magic  which  makes  the  familiar  yet  shad- 
owy figures  of  Shakspere  live  and  move 
and  start  from  the  printed  page  into  act- 
ual existence  in  the  flesh. 

Lamb's  liking  for  the  drama  and  for 
all  things  pertaining  to  the  drama  was 
second  only  to  his  love  for  Shakspere. 
The  ever -delightful  Tales  from  Shak- 
spere, over  which  he  toiled  despairingly 
— little  masterpieces  which  amply  repaid 
his  travail — are  scarcely  more  labors  of 
love  than  the  Specimens  of  English  Dra- 


matic  Poets  who  lived  about  the  Time  of 
Shakspere.  To  Lamb,  more  than  to  any 
other,  is  due  the  revival  of  interest  in  the 
Elizabethan  dramatists.  It  was  the  fresh 
discovery  of  these  old  dramatic  poets 
that  gave  him  the  impulse  to  write  "  John 
Woodvil."  In  the  modern  drama  even 
the  inferior  contemporary  farces  were 
not  despised,  and  some  of  them  are  re- 
membered now  only  because  Lamb  saw 
Munden  act  in  them.  Once  or  twice  he 
took  up  the  pen  of  the  regular  dramatic 
critic  to  bear  witness  against  the  play  of 
the  hour.  Even  then  he  is  as  gentle  al- 
most as  when  he  recalls  the  comedians  of 
an  earlier  day ;  he  was  not  one  of  those 
fierce  critics  who,  in  Douglas  Jerrold's 
phrase,  review  a  play  "  as  an  east  wind  re- 
views an  apple-tree."  The  acted  drama, 
the  actual  stage  of  the  present,  was  al- 
ways of  interest  to  Lamb,  and  served  not 
seldom  to  suggest  happy  illustrations  for 
his  notes  on  the  poetic  drama  of  the  past. 
It  is  difficult  for  any  one  who  has  had  to 
read  much  of  the  writings  of  other  theat- 
rical critics  to  speak  of  Charles  Lamb's  es- 
says on  histrionic  subjects  without  falling 


into  the  extravagance  of  eulogy,  the  very 
mid -summer  madness  of  praise.  There 
were  in  his  day  two  other  lovers  of  the 
theatre,  able  men  both  of  them,  having 
knowledge  of  the  stage  and  insight  and  im- 
agination— Hazlitt  and  Leigh  Hunt.  But 
what  are  they  beside  Charles  Lamb  ?  Col- 
eridge bids  us  "compare  Charles  Lamb's 
exquisite  criticisms  on  Shakspere  with 
Hazlitt 's  round  and  round  imitations  of 
them  ;"  and  to  Leigh  Hunt  such  a  com- 
parison would  be  still  less  favorable.  In- 
deed, there  is  but  one  who  has  written 
about  the  English  stage  at  all  worthy 
to  be  set  beside  Charles  Lamb,  and  he  is 
the  author  of  an  Apology  for  the  Life  of 
Colley  Cibber.  Like  Bos  well,  Cibber  was 
personally  contemptible  enough  ;  and  like 
Boswell,  he  had  the  unknown  art  to  make 
a  great  book,  unequalled  of  its  kind. 
There  are  two  grand  portrait  galleries  of 
the  British  theatre,  and  it  is  not  easy  to 
say  which  is  the  more  artful  a  painter  of 
players— Colley  Cibber  or  Charles  Lamb. 
Beside  the  full  -  length  portraits  of  Bet- 
terton,  Mrs.  Barry,  and  Mrs.  Bracegirdle — 
speaking  likenesses  every  one  of  them, 


soundly  drawn  and  mellow  in  color,  as 
we  see  them  in  the  Apology  —  may  be 
placed  the  group  from  "  Twelfth  Night," 
which  we  find  in  the  Essays  of  Elia — Mrs. 
Jordan  as  Viola,  Bensley  as  Malvolio, 
Dodd  as  Sir  Andrew,  and  Dickey  Suett 
as  the  Clown.  And  Gibber,  of  course,  was 
wholly  without  the  boundless  humor  that 
has  depicted  for  us  a  few  of  the  five  hun- 
dred faces  of  Munden,  and  captured  on 
canvas  a  glimpse  of  Elliston, "  joyousest 
of  once  embodied  spirits." 

Although  only  one  of  Lamb's  dramatic 
pieces  got  itself  acted  at  last,  all  of  them 
were  written  for  the  stage.  He  never 
gave  in  to  the  heresy  of  the  unactable 
drama.  His  plays  were  intended  to  be 
played,  as  Shakspere's  were,  and  Mar- 
lowe's and  Chapman's,  and  those  of  the 
other  great  men  whom  he  loved  and 
lived  with.  To  him,  as  to  them,  a  play 
which  could  not  be  played  was  no  play 
at  all.  A  "  Drama  for  the  Closet "  is 
surely  a  patent  absurdity  —  bon  a  mettre 
au  cabinet,  in  Moliere's  phrase.  Lamb 
was  too  keen-sighted  in  matters  of  litera- 
ture not  to  know  that  form  is  of  the  es- 


sence  of  art,  and  that  therefore  every  lit- 
erary effort  must  conform  to  its  purpose. 
He  would  never  have  accepted  the  latter- 
day  theory  that  there  are  two  kinds  of 
drama — that  intended  to  t>e  acted,  and  that 
not  intended  to  be  acted.  He  was  fond  of 
paradox,  no  doubt ;  but  it  would  be  a 
paradox  too  much  for  even  his  stomach 
that  a  string  of  decasyllabic  dialogues, 
lacking  the  relief,  the  color,  and  the 
movement  needed  by  the  stage,  should 
declare  itself  to  be  a  drama. 

Unfortunately,  the  serious  drama  of 
Lamb's  day  was  empty  arid  inept ;  and  so 
he  went  back  for  his  model  to  the  Eliza- 
bethans. He  did  not  consider  that  the 
change  in  the  physical  conditions  of  the 
theatre  forced  a  change  in  the  form  of 
the  drama.  The  turbulent  throng  which 
stood  of  an  afternoon  in  the  uncovered 
pit  of  the  Globe  Theatre  to  see  a  boy 
Lady  Macbeth  act  before  a  curtain  declar- 
ing itself  to  be  a  royal  palace,  was  very 
different  from  the  decorous  audience 
which  sat  in  Drury  Lane  to  gaze  in  won- 
der at  the  decorations  and  illuminations 
contrived  by  De  Lutherbourg  for  the 


"  Christmas  Tale  "  of  David  Garrick.  The 
stage  has  its  changing  evolutions,  like 
society  ;  but  Lamb,  though  he  might  con- 
fess the  change,  did  not  feel  it.  "  Hang 
the  age!"  he  cfied;  "I'll  write  for  an- 
tiquity." 

Now  Shakspere,  if  he  were  alive, 
would  not  write  for  antiquity.  As  a  prac- 
tical man,  he  would  make  skilful  use  of 
every  modern  improvement.  Knowing 
how  needful  it  is  to  catch  the  eye  of  the 
public,  he  would  turn  to  advantage  all 
later  devices  of  scenery  and  stage-mech- 
anism and  electric -lighting.  Indeed,  I 
doubt  not  that  were  Shakspere  writing 
for  the  stage  nowadays  there  would  not 
be  wanting  dramatic  critics  to  say  that  he 
was  too  "sensational!"  and  to  intimate 
that  he  catered  to  the  taste  of  the  gallery. 
Of  a  truth — if  the  digression  may  be  par- 
doned— "  Hamlet  "  is  a  very  sensational 
play ;  it  has  a  ghost  and  a  duel  and  no 
end  of  fighting,  and  an  indiscriminate 
slaughter  at  the  end  ;  and  before  that  con- 
summation a  young  lady  goes  mad  in 
white  muslin,  and  there  is  a  clown  at  the 
burying,  and  a  fight  over  her  grave.  It 


has  something  more  and  other  than  these 
physical  facts ;  it  has  that  within  which 
passeth  show.  But  it  has  the  show-part 
— the  mere  appeal  to  the  eye — as  very  few 
plays  have.  And  in  this  quality  "  Mac- 
beth "  and  "  Romeo  and  Juliet "  are  but 
little  inferior  to  "  Hamlet."  They  could, 
every  one  of  them,  be  acted  in  dumb 
show  before  a  company  of  miners  just  out 
from  the  mouth  of  the  coal-pit,  and  the 
story  would  be  followed  with  interest. 

This  is  what  Theophile  Gautier  had  in 
mind  when  he  said  that  the  skeleton  of 
every  good  drama  is  a  pantomime.  Ac- 
tion, of  course,  is  only  the  bare  bones  of 
a  play,  and  must  be  covered  with  the  liv- 
ing flesh  of  poetry.  There  can  be  no  true 
life  in  a  piece  unless  it  has  a  solid  skele- 
ton—  a  play  may  even  exist  with  but  a 
scant  clothing  of  verbiage,  as  we  may  see 
in  any  vulgar  melodrama;  but  the  finest 
poetry  cannot  give  life  to  a  drama  unless 
the  bones  of  its  story  are  well  knit  and 
well  jointed.  This  is  what  the  Eliz- 
abethans intuitively  understood,  in  spite 
of  the  rudeness  of  their  stage.  This  is 
what  Lamb  seems  never  to  have  been 


able  to  achieve.  In  externals,  "John 
Woodvil "  is  at  times  strangely  like  a 
minor  work  of  a  minor  fellow  -  drama- 
tist of  Shakspere.  We  do  not  wonder 
that  Godwin,  happening  unawares  on  the 
lines — 

"To  see  the  sun  to  bed  and  to  arise, 
Like  some  hot  amorist  with  glowing  eyes — ' 

came  to  Lamb  to  ask  in  which  of  the  old 
dramatists  they  might  be  found.  In  in- 
ternal structure,  however,  there  is  nothing 
Elizabethan  in  "  John  Woodvil ;"  there  is 
no  backbone  of  action — the  story  is  in- 
vertebrate. 

Lamb  knew  his  own  deficiencies  in  this 
respect,  though  he  did  not  recognize  their 
extent  or  their  importance.  He  wrote  to 
Mrs.  Shelley,  in  1827,  while  he  was  en- 
gaged on  "  The  Pawnbroker's  Daughter," 
that  he  could  do  the  dialogue  readily 
enough,  "  but  the  damned  plot — I  believe 
I  must  omit  it  altogether.  The  scenes 
come  one  after  another  like  geese,  not 
marshalled  like  cranes  or  a  Hyde  Park 
review.  ...  I  want  some  Howard  Payne 
to  sketch  a  skeleton  of  artfully-succeed- 


ing  scenes  through  a  whole  play,  as  the 
courses  are  arranged  in  a  cookery-book,  I 
to  find  wit,  passion,  sentiment,  character, 
and  the  like  trifles;  to  lay  in  the  dead 
colors,  I'd  Titianesque  'em  up;  to  mark 
the  channel  in  a  cheek  (smooth  or  fur- 
rowed, yours  or  mine),  and  where  tears 
should  course,  I'd  draw  the  water  down  ; 
to  say  where  a  joke  should  come  in,  or  a 
pun  be  left  out ;  to  bring  my  personae  on 
and  off  like  a  Beau  Nash,  and  I'd  Frank- 
enstein them  there ;  to  bring  three  to- 
gether on  the  stage  at  once — they  are  so 
shy  with  rne  that  I  can  get  no  more  than 
two,  and  there  they  stand  until  it  is  the 
time,  without  being  the  season,  to  with- 
draw them." 

This  is  a  free  confession  that  Lamb  did 
not  know  the  rudiments  of  the  play- 
wright's trade.  Bating  a  jot  here  and 
there  for  the  exaggeration  of  the  humor- 
ist, we  may  accept  this  account  of  his 
failings  as  fairly  exact.  But  though  he 
could  not  help  himself,  he  could  give  ex- 
cellent advice  to  his  neighbor.  William 
Godwin  did  not  lose  heart  after  the  un- 
timely taking  off  of  his  "  Antonio,"  most 


humorously  chronicled  by  Lamb.  He  got 
ready  another  tragedy,  which  Kemble  de- 
clined ;  and  he  sketched  out  a  third, 
which  was  submitted  to  Lamb  for  sug- 
gestions. In  these  Lamb  was  fertile;  and 
though  the  seed  he  dropped  fell  on  stony 
ground,  much  of  it  was  worthy  of  a  richer 
soil.  There  is  a  letter  of  his  wherein  he 
develops  out  of  his  friend's  feeble  plot  a 
strong  situation,  almost  identical  with  the 
second  act  of  the  "  Lucrece  Borgia "  of 
Victor  Hugo.  And  in  a  preceding  letter 
he  had  hit  upon  a  situation  very  like  that 
on  which  turns  the  plot  of  the  operatic 
"  La  Favorita."  These  two  letters  of 
Lamb's  should  be  studied  by  all  who  seek 
for  success  on  the  stage.  They  are  full 
not  only  of  that  criticism  of  life  which  is 
the  only  true  criticism  of  literature,  but 
of  a  knowledge  of  stage-devices,  and  of 
the  means  whereby  an  audience  may  be 
taken  captive,  very  remarkable  in  one 
who  could  not  apply  his  precepts  in  his 
own  practice  and  for  his  own  benefit. 

Here,  for  instance,  are  a  few  of  Lamb's 
dramatic  dicta:  "Some  such  way  seems 
dramatic,  and  speaks  to  the  eye. . . .  These 


ocular  scenes  are  so  many  great  land- 
marks, rememberable  headlands,  and 
light-houses  in  the  voyage.  Macbeth's 
witch  has  a  good  advice  to  a  magic  writer 
what  to  do  with  his  spectator : 

'Show  his  eyes,  and  grieve  his  heart.' 

You  must  not  open  any  of  the  truth  to 
Dawley  by  means  of  a  letter :  a  letter  is 
a  feeble  messenger  on  the  stage.  Some- 
body, the  son  or  his  friend,  must,  as  a 
cou f -de-main,  be  exasperated,  and  obliged 
to  tell  the  husband." 

"  I  am  for  introducing  situations,  sorts 
of  counterparts  to  situations,  which  have 
been  tried  in  other  plays — like,  but  not 
the  same.  On  this  principle  I  recom- 
mended a  friend  like  Horatio  in  '  The 
Fair  Penitent,'  and  on  this  principle  I  rec- 
ommend a  situation  like  Othello  with  re- 
lation to  Desdemona's  intercession  to 
Cassio.  By-scenes  may  likewise  receive 
hints.  The  son  may  see  his  mother  at  a 
mask  or  feast — as  Romeo,  Juliet.  The 
festivity  of  the  company  contrasts  with 
the  strong  perturbations  of  the  individ- 
ual. Dawley  may  be  told  his  wife's  past 


unchastity  at  a  mask  by  some  witch- 
character — as  Macbeth  upon  the  heath — 
in  dark  sentences.  This  may  stir  his  brain 
and  be  forgot,  but  come  in  aid  of  stronger 
proof  hereafter.  From  this  what  you  will 
perhaps  call  whimsical  way  of  counter- 
parting,  this  honest  stealing  and  original 
mode  of  plagiarism,  much  yet,  I  think, 
remains  to  be  sucked. 

"  I  am  certain  that  you  must  mix  up 
some  strong  ingredients  of  distress  to  give 
a  savor  to  your  pottage.  Your  hero 
must  kill  a  man,  or  do  something!'  Ear- 
lier in  the  same  letter  Lamb  had  said, 
"  A  tragic  auditory  wants  blood"  and  had 
warned  Godwin  not  to  disappoint  them 
of  the  tragic  ending. 

After  all,  there  is  nothing  so  very  un- 
usual in  the  fact  that  as  a  critic  he  knew 
what  ought  to  be  done,  although  as  a 
dramatist  he  could  not  do  it.  Charles 
Lamb  was  a  genius,  and  William  Godwin 
was  not ;  but  from  a  seat  in  the  pit  "  John 
Woodvil,"  which  was  never  acted,  is  lit- 
tle or  no  better  a  play  than  "  Antonio," 
which  was  damned. 

"  I  am  the  worst  hand  in  the  world  at 


"3 

a  plot,"  writes  Lamb  to  Godwin  ;  and  we 
can  call  "John  Woodvil  "  to  bear  witness 
to  his  truth.  Strictly  speaking,  Lamb's 
tragedy  has  no  plot,  although  it  has  a 
story.  It  lacks  the  chain  of  closely  link- 
ed incidents  and  situations  which  we  are 
wont  to  demand  in  a  play.  The  merits 
of  "  John  Woodvil  "  are  poetic  merely, 
and  dramatic  only  by  accident  or  in  in- 
cidentals. 

A  word  or  two  here  as  to  Lamb's  poe- 
try may  be  in  place.  It  may  be  doubted 
whether,  in  any  strict  use  of  the  word, 
Lamb  was  a  poet  at  all ;  but  as  I  write 
this  the  memory  comes  back  of  "  Hester," 
and  of  "The  Old  Familiar  Faces,"  and  of 
certain  passages  in  "  John  Woodvil,"  and 
it  seems  a  harsh  judgment.  De  Quincey, 
a  kindly  critic,  who  credited  Lamb's 
prose  with  the  "  rarest  felicity  of  finish 
and  expression,"  called  his  verse  "very 
pretty,  very  elegant,  very  tender,  very 
beautiful,"  but  thought  that  he  was  as 
one  to  whom  the  writing  of  verse  "  was  a 
secondary  and  occasional  function  ;  not 
his  original  and  natural  vocation  —  not 
an  epyov,  but  a  iraptpyov."  In  short,  Lamb 


had  his  poetic  impulses  and  his  poetic 
moments,  but  they  were  not  long-lived. 
In  verse,  as  in  prose,  he  had  always  some- 
thing to  say;  and  he  said  it  aptly,  with 
care.  His  is  not  the  polished  verse  that  re- 
flects only  the  empty  image  of  its  writer. 
Nor  is  he  like  that  French  poet  of  whom 
Malibran  used  to  speak,  and  who  was  rich 
in  words  and  poor  in  ideas ;  so  the  great 
singer  described  him  as  "  trying  to  make 
a  vapor-bath  with  a  single  drop  of  water." 
Lamb  did  not  try  to  make  a  vapor-bath, 
and  he  was  never  reduced  to  a  single 
drop  of  water. 

Of  "John  Woodvil,"  the  minor  char- 
acters reveal  themselves  in  their  deeds, 
and  they  are  grouped  skilfully  to  set  off 
the  hero.  But  the  hero  himself  is  not 
a  man  of  action — he  is  an  elegant  con- 
versationalist. How  Kemble  must  have 
longed  for  the  fine  speeches  which  John 
Woodvil  pours  forth  !  They  were  full  of 
a  true  poetry  he  could  well  appreciate, 
and  exactly  suited  to  his  cast  of  thought 
and  histrionic  habit.  Yet  he  was  right  to 
reject  the  play,  even  had  he  not  had 
"  Antonio  "  as  a  warning.  There  is  not 


much  to  act  in  "  Woodvil."  The  man 
does  little  or  nothing  ;  he  talks  and  stalks, 
and  talks  again  ;  once  he  seems  about  to 
get  drunk,  which  might  enliven  the  story 
somewhat,  and  once  he  fights  a  duel ; 
but  as  he  spares  his  adversary's  life,  even 
this  pleasing  incident  lacks  finish.  The 
end  of  the  drama  is  tame  beyond  endur- 
ance on  the  stage.  If,  however,  we  put 
down  our  opera-glasses,  and  read  "John 
Woodvil  "  quietly  by  the  fireside,  there 
is  much  to  reward  us.  The  character  of 
Margaret  is  beautifully  presented  and  de- 
veloped. She  is  akin  to  Shakspere's 
women  both  in  character  and  in  ad- 
venture. Even  the  manly  disguise  she 
does  is  a  frequent  Elizabethan,  and  in- 
deed Shaksperian,  device.  The  dialogue 
throughout  is  full  of  the  tricks  of  the 
older  dramatists,  especially  a  constant 
dropping  into  rhyme. 

At  the  time  Lamb  wrote  "  John  Wood- 
vil "  he  was  in  the  fresh  flush  of  his  de- 
light in  the  plays  of  Beaumont  and  Fletch- 
er, and  of  Marlowe.  In  the  joy  of  his 
discovery  of  these  poets  and  of  their  fel- 
lows, and  in  the  heat  of  the  imitative  fever 


this  gave  him  consciously  or  unconscious- 
ly, he  wrote,  besides  the  tragedy,  a  dra- 
matic sketch  called  "  The  Witch."  This 
fills  a  scant  three  pages  in  the  collected 
edition  of  his  poems,  but  it  is  an  extraor- 
dinary production.  It  might  be  a  frag- 
ment recovered  from  a  lost  play  by  the 
author  of  "The  Duchess  of  Malfy  "  or 
"The  White  Devil."  It  has  the  secret, 
black,  and  midnight  atmosphere.  "  The 
Witch  "  is  as  Elizabethan  as  "  John  Wood- 
vil "  in  external  language,  and  even  more 
so  in  the  internal  feeling  and  thought. 

Two  other  of  Lamb's  dramatic  attempts 
may  be  dismissed  briefly  before  taking 
the  one  play  of  his  which  did  undergo 
the  ordeal  by  fire,  and  was  seen  by  the 
light  of  the  lamps.  One  of  these  was 
"  The  Wife's  Trial ;  or  the  Intruding 
Widow,"  which  the  author  declared  to  be 
a  dramatic  poem  founded  on  Mr.  Crabbe's 
tale  of  "  The  Confident."  It  is  a  story  in 
dialogue  rather  than  a  play,  although  cer- 
tain passages  in  it  might  not  act  ill.  The 
other  theatrical  effort  was  "  The  Pawn- 
broker's Daughter,"  a  farce  in  two  acts. 
This  was  founded  on  his  own  essay  "  On 


the  Inconvenience  of  being  Hanged."  It 
was  written  nearly  a  score  of  years  after 
"Mr.  H.,"  and  from  a  letter  to  Southey  it 
seems  as  though  there  was  once  some 
hope  of  its  being  acted  at  the  Haymarket 
Theatre.  "  Tis  an  extravaganza,"  wrote 
Lamb,  "and  like  enough  to  follow  'Mr. 
H.' "  "The  Pawnbroker's  Daughter"  is 
a  very  whimsical  piece.  Like  "  Mr.  H.," 
it  was  quite  the  equal  of  the  average 
farce  of  the  first  quarter  of  this  century. 
To  us  its  fault  is  that  it  is  not  above  this 
average.  Cutlet  is  an  amusing  character, 
and  so  is  Pendulous  :  in  each  of  these  are 
to  be  seen  strokes  of  Lamb's  genuine  hu- 
mor. At  the  fall  of  the  curtain  comes 
the  dramatic  millennium,  when  every- 
body forgives  and  forgets,  and  is  happy. 

The  one  play  of  Lamb's  known  to  ev- 
erybody is  the  two-act  farce  called  "Mr. 
H.,"  acted  at  Drury  Lane  Theatre,  De- 
cember 10,  1806,  and  damned  out  of  hand. 
"  These  are  our  failures,"  said  Mr.  Brum- 
mel's  valet;  and  "Mr.  H."  is,  in  England, 
always  accounted  one  of  Lamb's  failures, 
and  quite  the  worst  of  them.  It  was  acted 
but  one  night.  The  prologue  was  received 


with  great  favor,  and  Lamb,  who  was  sit- 
ting with  his  sister  in  the  front  row  of  the 
pit,  joined  in  the  applause.  The  curtain 
fell  silently  at  the  end  of  the  first  act. 
During  the  second,  some  of  the  spectators 
began  to  hiss,  and  Lamb  went  with  the 
crowd,  "  and  hissed  and  hooted  as  loudly 
as  any  of  his  neighbors."  Talfourd  tells  us 
that  Elliston,  who  played  "  Mr.  H.,"  would 
have  tried  it  again,  but  "  Lamb  saw  at 
once  that  the  case  was  hopeless." 

The  farce  has  not  been  performed  since 
in  England,  to  my  knowledge,  save  twice 
only.  It  was  given  at  an  amateur  per- 
formance in  1822,  by  the  late  Charles 
James  Mathews,  when  the  young  archi- 
tect who  was  one  day  to  be  Elliston's  le- 
gitimate successor  as  the  airiest  of  light 
comedians,  acted  in  this  play,  which  had 
been  damned  at  Drury  Lane,  and  in  an- 
other, which  had  been  damned  at  Covent 
Garden — both  of  these  misfortunes  being 
duly  set  forth  on  the  play-bill  with  char- 
acteristically impudent  humor.  And  it 
was  given  once  again  some  sixty  years 
later  at  the  Gaiety  Theatre  in  London,  at 
a  single  matinee,  by  a  little  band  of  enthu- 


siastic  young  actors  and  actresses  calling 
themselves  "  The  Dramatic  Students." 
And  these  are  the  only  two  appearances 
of  "  Mr.  H."on  the  London  stage. 

The  consensus  of  British  criticism  is 
that  "  Mr.  H."  was  too  slight  for  the  the- 
atre and  too  wire  -  drawn  in  its  humor, 
and  that  its  failure  was  what  might  have 
been  expected.  From  this  view  an  Amer- 
ican, for  reasons  to  be  given  hereafter, 
feels  called  upon  to  dissent.  No  doubt 
4<  Mr.  H."  is  not  one  of  the  author's  rich- 
est works ;  nor,  on  the  other  hand,  is  it 
as  barren  and  bare  as  its  critics  have  de- 
clared. To  my  mind,  "  Mr.  H."  is  not  at 
all  a  bad  farce,  as  the  farces  of  the  time 
go  :  in  1806  a  popular  farce  was  not  re- 
quired to  be  as  substantial  and  as  in- 
structive as  a  tragedy.  It  has  scarcely 
action  enough  for  two  acts  ;  but  it  is  no 
slighter  in  plot  and  situation  than  the 
flimsy  five -act  comedies  of  Frederick 
Reynolds,  whose  "  Dramatist  "  and  "  No- 
toriety "  were  very  well  received  in  their 
day  and  are  carefully  forgotten  in  ours. 
It  is  "well  cut,"  as  the  French  phrase  it 
— well  planned,  well  laid  out.  In  the  first 


act  is  the  wonder,  the  perplexity,  the 
guessing,  the  questioning  as  to  the  name 
hidden  behind  this  single  aspirate.  In 
the  second  we  have  the  unexpected  dis- 
closure, the  general  repulse,  and  the  hap- 
py deliverance.  The  dialogue  is  actable  ; 
it  is  fairly  good  stage  dialogue,  lending 
itself  to  the  art  of  the  actor ;  and  while 
it  is  not  in  Lamb's  best  manner,  it  is  of 
far  higher  literary  quality  than  can  be 
found  in  the  faded  afterpieces  of  that 
time,  or  in  the  more  highly  colored  farces 
of  our  day.  The  fault  of  the  piece,  the 
fatal  fault,  was  the  keeping  of  the  secret 
from  the  spectators.  To  keep  a  secret  is 
a  misconception  of  true  theatrical  effect, 
an  improper  method  of  sustaining  dra- 
matic suspense.  An  audience  is  inter- 
ested not  in  what  the  end  may  be,  but  in 
the  means  whereby  that  end  is  to  be 
reached.  Before  the  play  was  done,  Lamb 
wrote  to  Manning  (then  in  China)  that 
"  the  whole  depends  on  the  manner  in 
which  the  name  is  brought  out."  If  the 
audience  that  night  had  been  slyly  let  into 
the  secret  in  an  early  scene,  they  would 
have  had  double  enjoyment  in  watch- 


ing  the  futile  endeavors  of  the  dramatis 
persontz  to  divine  it,  and  they  would  not 
have  been  disappointed  when  Mr.  Hogs- 
flesh  let  slip  his  full  patronymic.  Kept 
in  ignorance,  the  spectators  joined  the 
actors  in  speculation  ;  and  when  the  word 
was  revealed  they  were  not  amused  by 
the  disgust  of  the  actors,  so  annoyed  were 
they  that  they  had  been  puzzled  by  a  vul- 
gar name. 

Perhaps,  too,  there  was  a  certain  reac- 
tion after  the  undue  expectancy  raised 
by  the  prologue.  Lamb  wrote  to  Words- 
worth that  the  number  of  friends  they 
"had  in  the  house  .  .  .  was  astonishing." 
Now,  nothing  is  so  dangerous  on  the  first 
night  of  a  new  play  as  a  large  number  of 
the  author's  friends  in  the  audience.  One 
is  greatly  inclined  to  regret  that  Lamb 
did  not  yield  to  Elliston,  and  let  the  play 
be  acted  again.  If  it  had  had  a  second 
chance,  the  injudicious  friends  would  have 
been  absent,  and  the  name  of  the  hero 
would  have  been  noised  abroad — and  once 
in  the  possession  of  this  secret,  the  au- 
dience might  well  have  laughed  long  and 
heartily  at  the  hero's  misadventures. 


The  reason  that  an  American  hazards 
this  supposition  is  simply  that  the  experi- 
ment was  tried  in  these  United  States, 
and  with  success.  Three  months  after 
"  Mr.  H."  was  seen  at  Drury  Lane  it  was 
brought  out  in  New  York,  at  the  Park 
Theatre,  where  it  was  acted  for  the  first 
time  March  16,  1807.  It  seems  to  have 
made  no  great  hit  and  no  marked  failure. 
Mr.  Ireland,  whose  Records  of  the  New 
York  Stage  is  the  model  book  of  its  kind 
— erudite,  ample,  and  exact — finds  no  rec- 
ord of  the  repetition  of  "  Mr.  H."  until 
1824,  when  it  was  performed  "  by  desire." 
In  1812,  however,  it  had  been  produced 
by  the  very  remarkable  company  then 
gathered  at  the  Chestnut  Street  Theatre 
of  Philadelphia.'  Mr.  William  B.  Wood, 
one  of  the  managers  of  the  theatre,  acted 
Mr.  H.,and  in  the  highly  interesting  vol- 
ume of  histrionic  autobiography  which 
he  published  in  1854,  under  the  title  of 
Personal  Recollections  of  the  Stage,  he  re- 
cords the  result  in  one  brief  and  pregnant 
paragraph  :  "  Charles  Lamb's  excellent 
farce  of  'Mr.  H.'  met  with  extraordinary 
success,  and  was  played  an  unusual  num- 


(  UNIVERSITY 
^ 


her  of  nights."  Mr.  Ireland  has  found 
that  Wood  continued  to  act  the  part  for 
ten  or  a  dozen  years.  I  can  hope  only 
doubtfully  that  some  tidings  of  the  bet- 
ter fate  that  befell  "  Mr.  H."  here  beside 
the  Hudson  and  the  Schuylkill  was  borne 
across  the  Atlantic  to  the  attic  near  the 
Thames  where  Lamb  received  his  friends 
of  a  Wednesday  evening  ;  but  I  fear-  me 
greatly  this  good  news  did  not  venture 
on  the  wintry  voyage,  or  some  record  of 
his  pride  at  this  unexpected  reversal  of 
the  London  verdict  by  the  higher  court 
of  Philadelphia  would  linger  in  one  of 
the  many  letters  to  Manning. 

"  And  so  I  go  creeping  on,"  Lamb  wrote 
to  Manning,  "  since  I  was  lamed  by  that 
cursed  fall  from  off  the  top  of  Drury  Lane 
Theatre  into  the  pit,  something  more  than 
a  year  ago.  However,  I  have  been  free  of 
the  house  ever  since,  and  the  house  was 
pretty  free  with  me  on  that  occasion." 

It  cannot  be  doubted  that  this  freedom 
of  the  theatre  was  a  precious  privilege  to 
one  like  Lamb,  who  had  no  great  store  of 
wealth.  In  1817  he  moved  to  Russell 
Street,  with  Drury  Lane  in  sight  from  the 


front  window,  and  Covent  Garden  from 
the  back  ;  and  here  he  lived  for  six  years, 
almost  within  sound  of  the  orchestras  of 
the  two  patent  houses,  almost  within  hear- 
ing of  the  double  tinkle  of  the  bell  that 
rolled  up  the  great  green  curtain.  It  was 
perhaps  the  right  of  admission  purchased 
by  "  Mr.  H,"  which  gave  him  the  chance 
to  study  certain  of  the  old  actors  about 
whom  Elia  was  to  discourse  in  days  to 
come  with  ample  humor  and  exact  knowl- 
edge. To  the  end  Elliston,  who  had  act- 
ed "  Mr.  H.,"  remained  a  prime  favorite. 
To  the  end  the  playhouse  was  for  Lamb 
a  haven  of  rest ;  for  there,  as  he  looked 
across  the  smoky  flare  of  the  footlights 
into  the  mystic  recesses  beyond,  he  could 
forget  himself,  and  find  surcease  of  sor- 
row, relief  from  haunting  dread,  and  rec- 
reation after  "that  dry  drudgery  at  the 
desk's  dead  wood." 

The  hour  came  when  Lamb  was  re- 
leased from  doing  his  daily  stent  of  labor, 
but  that  hour  took  away  perhaps  as  much 
as  it  brought.  Comrades  began  to  drop 
by  the  wayside ;  on  the  stage  also  the 
ranks  of  the  old  favorites  were  thinning ; 


and  even  behind  the  curtain  Lamb  missed 
"the  old  familiar  faces."  The  hour  came 
when  Mary  Lamb,  who  had  worked  with 
him  over  the  Tales  from  Shakspere,  and 
who  had  sat  by  him  in  the  pit  at  the  hiss- 
ing of"  Mr.  H.,"  was  more  and  more  shut 
out  from  him  in  the  darkness  of  a  cloud- 
ed mind.  The  hour  came  when  Coleridge, 
the  friend  to  whom  he  had  tied  himself 
in  youth,  was  taken  from  him.  The  hour 
came  to  Charles  Lamb  at  last,  as  it  must 
come  to  all  of  us,  when — 

"We  speak  of  friends  and  their  fortunes, 

And  of  what  they  did  and  said, 
Till  the  dead  alone  seem  living, 
And  the  living  alone  seem  dead. 

"And  at  last  we  hardly  distinguish 

Between  the  ghosts  and  the  guests, 
And  a  mist  and  shadow  of  sadness 
Steals  over  our  merriest  jests." 


TWO   FRENCH   THEATRICAL 
CRITICS 

I.— M.  FRANCISQUE  SARCEY 

j)O  attempt  a  portrait  of  a  man 
of  letters  after  the  subject 
has  already  sat  to  two  limners 
as  accomplished  as  Mr.  Hen- 
ry James  and  M.  Jules  Le- 
maitre  is  venturesome  and  savors  of  con- 
ceit ;  but  nearly  fifteen  years  have  passed 
since  Mr.  James  made  his  off-hand  thumb- 
nail sketch  of  M.  Sarcey,  and  M.  Lemai- 
tre's  more  recent  and  more  elaborate  por- 
traiture in  pastels  was  intended  to  be 
seen  of  Parisians  only.  Moreover,  Mr. 
James,  although  he  praises  M.  Sarcey,  does 
so  with  many  reserves,  not  to  say  a  little 
grudgingly  ;  he  even  echoes  the  opinion 
once  current  in  Paris  that  M.  Sarcey  is 
heavy  —  an  opinion  which  M.  Lemaitre 
denounces  and  disproves. 


It  is  in  person  that  M.  Sarcey  is  heavy 
— in  body,  not  in  mind.  He  is  portly 
and  thick-set,  but  not  thick-witted.  He 
is  short-sighted  physically,  but  no  critic 
has  keener  insight.  His  judgments  are 
as  solid  and  as  firm-footed  as  his  tread. 
Sainte-Beuve  has  indicated  the  difference 
between  the  "grave,  learned,  definitive" 
criticism  which  penetrates  and  explains 
and  "  the  more  alert,  and  more  lightly 
armed"  criticism  which  gives  the  note  to 
contemporary  thought.  It  is  in  the  for- 
mer class,  among  the  "  grave,  learned,  de- 
finitive "  critics  that  M.  Sarcey  must  be 
placed  ;  but  his  serious  and  elaborate  deci- 
sions are  expressed  with  perhaps  as  much 
liveliness  and  as  much  point  as  any  one 
of  the  "  more  alert  and  more  lightly 
armed  "  may  display.  M.  Sarcey's  wit  is 
Voltairean  in  its  quality,  in  its  directness, 
and  in  its  ease.  Though  his  arm  is  strong 
to  smite  a  cutting  blow  if  need  be,  yet 
more  often  than  not  it  is  with  the  tip  of 
the  blade  that  he  punctures  his  adversary, 
fighting  fairly  and  breaking  through  the 
guard  by  skill  of  fence. 

And  of  fighting  M.  Sarcey  has  had  his 


128 


fill  since  he  entered  journalism  more  than 
thirty  years  ago.  Born  in  1828,  he  was 
admitted  to  the  Normal  School  in  1848 
in  the  class  with  Taine  and  Edmond 
About.  For  seven  years  after  his  gradu- 
ation in  1851,  he  served  as  a  professor  in 
several  small  towns,  constantly  involved 
in  difficulties  with  the  officials  of  the  Sec- 
ond Empire.  In  1858  he  gave  up  the 
desk  of  the  teacher  for  that  of  the  jour- 
nalist, and  coming  up  to  Paris  by  the  aid 
and  advice  of  About,  he  began  to  write 
for  the  Figaro.  The  next  year  the  Opin- 
ion Nattonale  was  started,  and  M.  Sarcey 
became  its  dramatic  critic.  In  1867  he 
transferred  his  services  to  the  Temps, 
which  is  indisputably  the  ablest  and  most 
dignified  of  all  Parisian  newspapers;  and 
to  the  Temps,  in  the  number  which  bears 
the  date  of  Monday  and  which  appears 
on  Sunday  afternoon,  M.  Sarcey  has  con- 
tributed for  now  nearly  a  quarter  of  a 
century  a  weekly  review  of  the  theatres, 
slowly  gaining  in  authority  until  for  a 
score  of  years  at  least  his  primacy  in  Paris 
as  a  dramatic  critic  has  been  beyond 
question. 


In  addition  to  this  hebdomadal  essay 
M.  Sarcey  has  descended  daily  into  the 
thick  of  contemporary  polemics.  He 
writes  an  article  nearly  every  day  on  the 
topic  of  the  hour.  When  About  started 
the  XIXe  Siecle  after  the  Prussian  war, 
M.  Sarcey  was  his  chief  editorial  con- 
tributor, leading  a  lively  campaign  against 
administrative  abuses  of  all  kinds  and  ex- 
posing sharply  the  blunders  of  the  eccle- 
siastical propaganda.  He  has  little  taste 
for  party  politics,  which  seem  to  him  arid 
and  fruitless ;  but  in  the  righting  of 
wrongs  he  is  indefatigable,  and  in  the 
discussion  of  urban  improvements,  enter- 
ing with  ardor  into  all  questions  of  water 
supplies,  sewerage  and  the  like.  And  to 
the  consideration  of  all  these  problems 
he  brings  the  broad  common -sense,  the 
stalwart  logic,  the  robust  energy  which 
are  his  chief  characteristics.  He  has 
common-sense  in  a  most  uncommon  de- 
gree ;  and  its  exercise  might  be  monoto- 
nous if  it  were  not  enlivened  by  ironic 
and  playful  wit. 

Calling  on  him  one  day  a  few  summers 
ago  and  being  hospitably  received  in  the 


spacious  library  which  his  friend  M. 
Charles  Gamier,  the  architect  of  the 
Opera,  has  arranged  for  him  in  the  wide- 
windowed  studio  of  a  house  purchased 
by  him  from  the  painter  who  had  built 
it  for  his  own  use,  M.  Sarcey  told  me  that 
he  was  a  little  surprised  to  discover  that 
such  reputation  as  he  might  have  outside 
of  his  own  country  was  chiefly  as  a  dra- 
matic critic,  whereas  in  France  he  was 
known  rather  as  a  working  journalist. 
Sitting  on  the  broad,  square  lounge  below 
the  wide  window  —  the  famous  Divan 
Rouge  of  which  M.  Sarcey  himself  has 
told  the  legend  in  the  pages  of  a  French 
review  —  I  suggested  that  perhaps  this 
was  owing  to  the  merely  local  interest  of 
the  subjects  the  daily  journalist  was  forced 
to  deal  with,  while  the  Parisian  dramatic 
critic  discussed  plays.,  many  of  which  were 
likely  to  be  exported  far  beyond  the 
boundaries  of  France  and  beyond  the  lim- 
its of  the  French  language.  I  asked  him 
also  how  it  was  that  he  had  never  made 
any  collection  of  his  dramatic  criticisms, 
or  even  a  selection  from  them,  as  Jules 
Janin  and  Theophile  Gautier  had  done 


in  the  past,  and  as  Auguste  Vitu  of  the 
Figaro  and  M.  Jules  Lemaitre  of  the  De- 
bats  had  more  recently  attempted. 

I  regret  that  I  cannot  recall  the  exact 
words  of  M.  Sarcey's  answer,  although 
my  recollection  of  the  purport  of  his  re- 
marks is  distinct  enough.  He  said  that 
he  had  not  collected  his  weekly  articles 
or  even  made  a  selection  from  them  be- 
cause they  were  journalism  and  not  liter- 
ature :  the  essential  difference  between 
journalism  and  literature  being  that  the 
newspaper  is  meant  for  the  moment  only 
while  the  book  is  intended  for  all  time, 
or  as  much  of  it  as  may  be ;  he  wrote  for 
the  Temps  his  exact  opinion  at  the  min- 
ute of  the  writing  and  having  in  view  all 
the  circumstances  of  the  hour.  He  said 
that  in  a  book  an  author  might  be  mod- 
erate in  assertion,  but  that  in  a  newspaper, 
which  would  be  thrown  away  between 
sunrise  and  sunset,  a  writer  at  times  must 
needs  force  the  note  ;  and  when  it  was 
worth  while,  he  must  be  ready  to  declare 
his  opinion  loudly,  with  insistence  and 
with  undue  emphasis.  Of  this  privilege 
he  had  availed  himself  in  the  Temps,  and 


this  was  one  reason  why  he  did  not  wish 
to  see  his  newspaper  articles  revived  after 
they  had  done  their  work.  (Here  I  feel  it 
proper  to  note  that  a  careful  reading  of 
M.  Sarcey's  feuilletons  every  week  for  now 
nearly  fourteen  years  has  shown  me  that 
although  his  enthusiasm  may  seem  at 
times  a  little  overstrained,  it  is  never  fac- 
titious and  it  is  never  for  an  unworthy 
object.) 

A  second  reason  M.  Sarcey  gave  for 
letting  his  dramatic  criticisms  sink  into 
the  oblivion  of  the  back  number  is  that 
he  always  gave  his  opinion  frankly  and 
fully  at  the  instant  when  his  impres- 
sions crystallized,  and  that  he  sometimes 
changed  these  opinions  when  a  play  was 
revived  or  when  a  player  was  seen  in  a 
new  part.  "  Now,  if  I  reprinted  my  feuil- 
letons, "said  he,  laughing,  "  I  should  lose 
the  right  to  contradict  myself." 

"  To  look  at  all  sides,"  Lowell  tells  us, 
"and  to  distrust  the  verdict  of  a  single 
mood,  is,  no  doubt,  the  duty  of  a  critic," 
but  the  hasty  review  of  a  play  penned  be- 
fore sunrise,  while  the  printer's  boy  waits 
for  copy,  is  of  necessity  the  verdict  of  a 


single  mood;  and  this  is  why  M.  Sarcey 
feels  the  need  of  keeping  his  mind  open 
to  fresh  impressions,  and  of  holding  him- 
self in  readiness  to  modify  his  opinion  if 
good  cause  is  shown  for  a  reversal  of  the 
previous  decision.  And  the  criticism  to 
which  Lowell  refers  is,  in  one  sense,  liter- 
ature, while  the  rapid,  reviewing  of  con- 
temporary art  can  never  be  more  than 
journalism,  tinctured  always  with  the  be- 
lief that  what  is  essential  is  news — first 
its  collection,  and  secondarily  a  comment 
upon  it. 

In  this  same  conversation  with  M.  Sar- 
cey in  his  library  he  told  me  that  he  had 
planned  a  book  on  the  drama — A  His- 
tory of  Theatrical  Conventions  was  to 
be  its  exact  title,  I  think  —  but  that  he 
had  done  little  or  nothing  towards  it. 
The  drama,  like  every  other  art,  is  based 
upon  the  passing  of  an  implied  agreement 
between  the  public  and  the  artist  by  which 
the  former  allows  the  latter  certain  privi- 
leges ;  and  in  no  art  are  these  conventions 
more  necessary  and  more  obvious  than  in 
the  art  of  the  stage.  The  dramatist  has 
|}ut  a  few  minutes  in  which  to  show  his 


action,  and  he  can  take  the  spectator  to 
but  a  few  places ;  therefore  he  has  to  se- 
lect, to  condense,  to  intensify  beyond  all 
nature ;  and  the  spectator  has  to  make 
allowances  for  the  needful  absence  of  the 
fourth  wall  of  the  room  in  which  the  scene 
passes,  for  the  directness  of  speech,  for 
the  omission  of  the  non-essentials  which 
in  real  life  cumber  man's  every  movement. 
Certain  of  these  conventions  are  perma- 
nent, immutable,  inevitable,  being  of  the 
essence  of  the  contract,  as  we  lawyers  say, 
inherent  in  any  conceivable  form  of  dra- 
matic art.  Certain  others  are  accidental, 
temporary,  different  in  various  countries 
and  in  various  ages. 

A  history  of  theatrical  conventions  as 
M.  Sarcey  might  tell  it  would  be  the  story 
of  dramatic  evolution  and  of  the  modifi- 
cation of  the  art  of  the  stage  in  accord 
with  the  changing  environment ;  it  would 
be  as  vital  and  as  pregnant  and  as  stimu- 
lating a  treatise  on  the  drama  and  its  es- 
sential principles  as  one  could  wish.  I 
expressed  to  M.  Sarcey  my  eagerness  to 
hold  such  a  book  in  my  hand  as  soon  as 
might  be.  He  laughed  again  heartily,  and 


returned  that  he  had  made  little  progress, 
and  that  he  was  in  no  hurry  to  set  forth 
his  ideas  nakedly  by  themselves  and  sys- 
tematically co-ordinated.  "  If  I  once  for- 
mulated my  theories,"  he  said,  "  with 
what  could  I  fill  my  feuilleton  —  those 
twelve  broad  columns  of  the  Temps  every 
week  ?" 

What  M.  Sarcey  has  not  yet  done  for 
himself  the  late  Becq  de  Fouquieres  at- 
tempted in  a  book  on  L'Art  de  la  Mise 
en  Scene,  the  principles  laid  down  in 
which  are  derived  mainly  from  M.  Sar- 
cey's  essays  in  the  Temps.  M.  de  Fou- 
quieres, it  is  to  be  noted,  had  not  M.  Sar- 
cey's  knowledge,  his  authority,  his  vigor, 
or  his  style,  but  his  treatise  is  logical  and 
valuable, and  may  be  recommended  heart- 
ily to  all  American  students  of  the  stage. 

That  M.  Sarcey  should  ever  feel  any 
difficulty  in  filling  his  allotted  space  is  in- 
conceivable to  those  who  wonder  weekly 
at  his  abundance,  his  variety,  and  his  over- 
flowing information.  The  post  of  dramat- 
ic critic  has  been  held  in  Paris  by  many 
distinguished  men,  who  for  the  most  part 
regarded  it  with  distaste  and  merely  as  a 


disagreeable  livelihood.  Theophile  Gau- 
tier  was  frequent  in  his  denunciation  of 
his  theatrical  servitude,  speaking  of  him- 
self as  one  toiling  in  the  galley  of  jour- 
nalism and  chained  to  the  oar  of  the 
feuilleton.  In  like  manner  Theodore  de 
Banville  and  M.  Frangois  Coppee  cried 
aloud  at  their  slavery,  and  sought  every 
occasion  for  an  excursus  from  the  pre- 
scribed theatrical  theme.  Even  M.Jules 
Lemaitre  now  and  again  strays  from  the 
path  to  discuss  in  the  Debats  a  novel  or 
a  poem  not  strictly  within  the  jurisdiction 
of  the  dramatic  critic.  M.  Sarcey  is  never 
faint  in  his  allegiance  to  the  stage,  and  he 
is  never  short  of  material  for  examination. 
If  there  are  no  novelties  at  the  theatres, 
there  may  be  new  books  about  the  stage. 
Or  if  these  fait  there  are  questions  of 
theatrical  administration.  Or,  in  default 
of  everything  else,  the  Comedie-Frangaise 
is  always  open,  and  in  the  dull  days  of  the 
summer  it  acts  the  older  plays,  the  come- 
dies and  tragedies  of  the  classical  reper- 
tory, and  in  these  M.  Sarcey  finds  many  a 
peg  on  which  to  hang  a  disquisition  on 
dramatic  esthetics.  I  will  not  say  that 


I  have  not  found  the  same  truth  presented 
more  than  once  in  the  seven  hundred  of 
M.  Sarcey's  weekly  essays  that  I  have 
read  and  preserved,  or  the  same  moral  en- 
forced more  than  once  ;  but  that  is  a  pret- 
ty poor  truth  which  will  not  bear  more 
than  one  repetition. 

Perhaps  the  first  remark  a  regular  read- 
er of  M.  Sarcey's  weekly  review  finds  him- 
self making  is  that  the  critic  has  a  pro- 
found knowledge  of  the  art  of  the  stage. 
Of  a  certainty  the  second  is  to  the  effect 
that  the  critic  very  evidently  delights  in 
his  work,  is  obviously  glad  to  go  to  the 
theatre  and  pleased  to  express  his  opinion 
on  the  play  and  the  performance.  No 
dramatic  critic  was  ever  more  conscien- 
tious than  M.  Sarcey,  none  was  ever  as  in- 
defatigable. Often  he  returns  to  see  a 
piece  a  second  time  before  recording  his 
opinion  in  print,  ready  to  modify  his  first 
impression  and  quick  to  note  the  effect 
produced  on  the  real  public,  the  broad 
body  of  average  play-goers  but  sparsely 
represented  on  first  nights. 

Next  to  his  enjoyment  of  his  work  and 
his  conscience  in  the  discharge  of  his 


138 


duty,  the  chief  characteristic  of  M.  Sarcey 
is  his  extraordinary  knowledge,  his  wide 
acquaintance  with  the  history  of  the  thea- 
tre in  Greece,  in  Rome,  and  in  France,  his 
close  hold  on  the  thread  of  dramatic  de- 
velopment, and  his  firm  grasp  of  the  vital 
principles  of  theatric  art.  He  understands 
as  no  one  else  the  theory  of  the  drama, 
the  why  and  the  wherefore  of  every  cog- 
wheel of  dramatic  mechanism.  He  seizes 
the  beauty  of  technical  details,  and  he  is 
fond  of  making  this  plain  to  the  ordinary 
play-goer,  who  is  conscious  solely  of  the 
result  and  careless  of  the  means.  He 
has  a  marvellous  faculty  of  seizing  the 
central  situation  of  a  play  and  of  setting 
this  forth  boldly,  dwelling  on  the  subsid- 
iary developments  of  the  plot  only  in  so 
far  as  they  are  needful  for  the  proper  ex- 
position of  the  more  important  point. 
By  directing  all  the  light  on  this  domi- 
nating and  culminating  situation,  the  one 
essential  and  pregnant  part  of  the  piece, 
M.  Sarcey  manages  to  convey  to  the 
reader  some  notion  of  the  effect  of  the 
acted  play  upon  the  audience — a  task  far 
above  the  calibre  of  the  ordinary  theatri- 


cal  critics,  who  content  themselves  gen- 
erally with  a  hap-hazard  and  hasty  sum- 
mary of  the  plot,  bald  and  barren.  From 
M.  Sarcey's  criticism  of  a  play  in  Paris  it 
is  possible  for  an  intelligent  reader  in 
New  York  to  appreciate  the  effect  of  the 
performance  and  to  understand  the  causes 
of  its  success  or  its  failure. 

His  criticism — even  when  one  is  most 
in  disagreement  with  his  opinions — is  al- 
ways informed  with  an  exact  appreciation 
of  the  possibilities  and  the  limitations  of 
the  acted  drama.  Here  is  M.  Sarcey's 
real  originality  as  a  theatrical  critic — that 
he  criticises  the  acted  drama  as  something 
to  be  acted.  With  the  possible  exception 
of  Lessing  —  whom  he  once  praised  to 
me  most  cordially,  declaring  that  he  was 
delighted  whenever  he  took  down  the 
Dramaturgic  and  chanced  upon  some 
dictum  of  the  great  German  critic  con- 
firmatory of  one  of  his  own  theories — with 
the  exception  of  Lessing  and  of  G.  H. 
Lewes,  M.  Sarcey  is  the  first  dramatic 
critic  of  literary  equipment  who  did  not 
consider  a  tragedy  or  a  comedy  merely  as 
literature  and  apart  from  its  effect  when 


acted.  La  Harpe  and  Geoffrey  might 
have  contented  themselves  with  reading 
at  home  the  plays  they  criticised  for  all 
the  effect  of  the  performance  to  be  de- 
tected in  their  comment.  Janin  and  Gau- 
tier  were  little  better:  to  them  a  drama 
was  a  specimen  of  literature,  to  be  judged 
by  the  rules  and  methods  applicable  to 
other  specimens  of  literature. 

Now  no  view  could  be  more  unjust  to 
the  dramatist.  A  play  is  written  not  to 
be  read,  primarily,  but  to  be  acted  ;  and 
if  it  is  a  good  play  it  is  seen  to  fullest 
advantage  only  when  it  is  acted.  M. 
Coquelin  has  recently  pointed  out  that 
if  Shakspere  and  Moliere,  the  greatest 
two  dramatists  that  ever  lived,  were  both 
careless  as  to  the  printing  of  their  plays, 
it  was  perhaps  because  both  knew  that 
these  plays  were  written  for  the  theatre, 
and  that  only  in  the  theatre  could  they  be 
judged  properly.  Seen  by  the  light  of 
the  lamps  a  play  has  quite  another  com- 
plexion from  that  it  bears  in  the  library. 
Passages  pale  and  dull,  it  may  be,  when 
read  coldly  by  the  eye,  are  lighted  by  the 
inner  fire  of  passion  when  presented  in 


the  theatre ;  and  the  solid  structure  of 
action,  without  which  a  drama  is  naught, 
may  stand  forth  in  bolder  relief  on  the 
stage.  A  play  in  the  hand  of  the  reader 
and  a  play  before  the  eye  of  the  spec- 
tator are  two  very  different  things  ;  and 
the  difference  between  them  bids  fair  to 
grow  apace  with  the  increasing  attention 
paid  nowadays  to  the  purely  pictorial 
side  of  dramatic  art,  to  the  costumes  and 
the  scenery,  to  the  illustrative  business 
and  the  ingenious  management  of  the 
lights.  No  one  knows  better  than  M. 
Sarcey  how  sharp  the  difference  is  be- 
tween the  play  on  the  stage  and  the  play 
in  the  closet,  and  no  one  has  indicated 
the  distinction  with  more  acumen.  He 
judges  the  play  before  him  as  it  impresses 
him  and  the  surrounding  play-goers  at  its 
performance  in  the  theatre,  and  not  as  it 
might  strike  him  on  perusal  alone  in  his 
study. 

And  this  is  one  reason  why—if  it  were 
necessary  to  declare  the  order  of  the 
critical  hierarchy — I  should  rank  M.  Sar- 
cey as  a  critic  of  the  acted  drama  more 
highly  than  any  British  critic  even  of 


the  great  days  of  British  dramatic  criti- 
cism, when  Lamb  and  Hazlitt  and  Leigh 
Hunt  were  practitioners  of  the  art.  The 
task  of  Hazlitt  and  of  Leigh  Hunt  was 
far  different  from  M.  Sarcey's.  The  Eng- 
lish.drama  of  their  day  was  so  feeble  that 
few  except  professed  students  of  theatri- 
cal history  can  now  recall  the  names  of 
any  play  or  of  any  playwright  of  that 
time ;  and  therefore  the  critics  devoted 
themselves  almost  altogether  to  an  analy- 
sis of  the  beauties  of  Shakspere  and  of 
the  art  of  acting  as  revealed  by  John 
Philip  Kemble,  Sarah  Siddons,  and  Ed- 
mund Kean.  Lamb's  subtle  and  para- 
doxical essays  are  retrospective,  the  best 
of  them,  and  commemorate  performers 
and  performances  held  in  affectionate  re- 
membrance. He  wrote  little  about  the 
actual  present,  and  thus  he  avoided  the 
double  difficulty  of  dramatic  criticism 
as  M.  Sarcey  has  to  meet  it  to-day  in 
France. 

This  double  difficulty  is,  that  when  the 
dramatic  critic  has  to  review  a  new  play 
he  is  called  upon  to  do  two  things  at 
once,  each  incompatible  with  the  other  : 


he  has  to  judge  the  play,  which  he  knows 
only  through  the  medium  of  the  acting, 
and  he  has  to  judge  the  acting,  which  he 
knows  only  as  it  is  shown  in  the  play; 
and  thus  there  is  a  double  liability  to 
error.  Neither  the  dramatist  nor  the 
comedian  stands  before  the  critic  simply 
and  directly — each  can  be  seen  only  as 
the  other  is  able  and  willing  to  declare 
him.  It  may  be  said  that  the  dramatic 
critic  does  not  see  a  new  play — he  sees 
only  a  performance,  and  this  perform- 
ance may  be  good  or  bad,  may  betray 
the  author  or  reinforce  him,  may  be  fair- 
ly representative  of  his  work  and  his 
wishes  or  may  not.  It  is  not  the  play 
itself  that  the  critic  sees — it  is  only  the 
performance.  If  the  play  is  in  print,  the 
critic  may  correct  the  impression  of  the 
single  representation,  or  he  may  do  so  if 
the  play  be  revived.  Lamb  and  Hazlitt 
and  Leigh  Hunt,  dealing  almost  wholly 
with  the  comedies  and  tragedies  of  the 
past,  all  of  which  were  in  print  and  in 
their  possession  for  quiet  perusal,  had  a 
far  easier  task  than  M.  Sarcey's  —  they 
had  to  do  little  more  than  comment  upon 


the  acting  or  express  their  pre-existing 
opinion  of  the  play  itself.  M.  Sarcey  has 
to  judge  both  piece  and  the  acting  at  the 
same  time,  and  he  has  to  judge  the  piece 
solely  through  the  medium  of  the  acting, 
and  the  acting  solely  through  the  medium 
of  the  piece ;  and  it  may  happen  that 
either  medium  refracts  irregularly.  Ev- 
ery actor,  every  dramatic  author,  every 
theatrical  manager  knows  that  there  are 
"  ungrateful  parts  "  and  "  parts  that  play 
themselves."  Out  of  the  former  the  best 
actor  can  make  but  little,  and  in  the  lat- 
ter the  defects  of  even  the  poorest  actor 
are  disguised. 

No  dramatic  critic  is  better  aware  of 
this  double  difficulty  than  M.  Sarcey,  and 
no  one  is  more  adroit  in  solving  it.  As 
far  as  natural  gifts  and  an  unprecedented 
experience  can  avail,  he  avoids  the  dan- 
ger. He  is  open-minded,  slow  to  formu- 
late his  opinion  and  always  ready  to  give 
a  play  or  a  player  a  rehearing.  He  is  never 
mean,  never  morose,  never  malignant.  He 
is  not  one  of  the  critics  who  attack  a  liv- 
ing author  with  the  callous  carelessness 
with  which  an  anatomist  goes  to  work  on 


a  nameless  cadaver.  He  is  no  more  easy 
to  please  than  any  other  expert  whose 
taste  is  fine,  though  his  sympathies  are 
broad  ;  but  when  he  is  pleased  he  is  em- 
phatic in  praise.  It  was  in  the  Idle  Man, 
in  his  wonderful  panegyric  of  Kean's 
acting,  that  Dana  said,  "  I  hold  it  to  be 
a  low  and  wicked  thing  to  keep  back 
from  merit  of  any  kind  its  due ;"  and  M. 
Sarcey  is  of  Dana's  opinion.  He  is,  capa- 
ble of  dithyrambic  rhapsodies  of  eulogy 
when  he  is  trying  to  warm  up  the  Parisian 
public  to  a  proper  appreciation  of  M. 
Meilhac's  "Gotte"  or  "  Decore,"  for  ex- 
ample; and  although  nobody  can  love 
New  York  more  than  I  do,  sometimes  one 
of  the  Temps  reviews  of  a  new  play  at  the 
Vaudeville,  of  a  revival  at  the  Odeon, 
or  of  a  first  appearance  at  the  Frangais 
is  enough  to  make  me  homesick  for 
Paris. 

As  a  critic  even  of  the  drama,  M.  Sar- 
cey has  his  limitations.  He  is  now  and 
then  insular — Paris  (like  New  York)  had 
its  origin  on  an  island.  At  times  he  is 
dogmatic  to  the  verge  of  despotism.  He 
has  the  defects  of  his  qualities ;  and  the 


first  of  his  qualities  is  a  robust  common- 
sense,  which  is  sometimes  a  little  com- 
monplace and  sometimes  again  a  little 
overwhelming,  a  little  intolerant.  Com- 
mon-sense is  an  old  failing  of  the  French. 
"  We  have  almost  all  of  us,"  says  M.  Jules 
Lemaitre,  "  more  or  less  Malherbe,  Boi- 
leau,  Voltaire,  and  M.  Thiers  in  our  mar- 
row." A  characteristic  of  all  these  typi- 
cal Frenchmen  was  pugnacity,  and  this  is 
one  of  M.  Sarcey's  most  valuable  qualities. 
He  fights  fair,  but  he  fights  hard.  His 
long  campaign  against  M.  Duquesnel  as 
the  manager  of  the  Odeon  and  his  re- 
peated attacks  on  the  theories  of  the  late 
M.  Perrin,  until  the  death  of  the  admin- 
istrator of  the  Comedie-Frangaise,  are 
memorable  instances  of  M.  Sarcey's  te- 
nacity. They  are  instances  also  of  his 
sagacity,  for  time  has  proved  the  truth  of 
his  contentions.  Again,  when  M.  Zola 
made  a  bitter  and  personal  retort  to  a 
plain-spoken  criticism,  M.  Sarcey  returned 
an  answer  as  good-tempered  as  any  one 
could  wish,  but  as  convincing  and  as  cut- 
ting as  any  of  M.  Zola's  many  opponents 
could  desire.  When  M.  Sarcey  picks  up 


the  gauntlet,  he   handles  his  adversary 
without  gloves. 

In  the  reply  to  M.  Zola,  as  elsewhere, 
M.  Sarcey  confessed  his  abiding  weakness 
— the  incurable  habit  of  heterophemy 
which  makes  him  miscall  names  in  al- 
most every  article  he  writes,  setting  down 
"  Edmond  "  when  it  should  be  "  Edward," 
and  the  like.  But  blunders  of  this  sort 
are  but  trifles  which  any  alert  proof- 
reader might  check,  and  which  every 
careful  reader  can  correct  for  himself. 
They  are  all  of  a  piece  with  M.  Sarcey 's 
writing,  which  abounds  in  familiarities, 
in  slang,  in  the  technical  terms  of  the 
stage,  in  happy-go-lucky  allusions  often 
exceedingly  felicitous,  and  in  frequent 
anecdotes  from  his  wide  reading  or  from 
his  own  experience.  The  result  is  a  style 
of  transparent  ease  and  of  indisputable 
sincerity.  Nobody  was  ever  in  doubt  as 
to  his  meaning  at  any  time,  or  in  doubt 
as  to  the  reason  why  he  meant  what  he 
said.  To  this  sincerity  M.  Sarcey  referred 
in  his  reply  to  M.  Zola,  and  to  it  he  owes, 
as  he  there  declared,  much  of  his  author- 
ity as  a  dramatic  critic.  With  the  public, 


i48 


intelligence  and  knowledge  count  for 
much,  and  skill  tells  also,  and  so  does 
wit ;  but  nothing  is  as  important  to  a 
critic  as  a  reputation  for  integrity,  for 
frankness,  for  absolute  honesty  in  the 
expression  of  his  opinions. 

To  keep  this  reputation  free  from  sus- 
picion M.  Sarcey  declined  to  solicit  the 
succession  of  Emile  Augier  in  the  French 
Academy.  In  a  dignified  and  pathetic 
letter  to  the  public,  he  declared  that  al- 
though he  believed  that  most  of  the 
dramatists  who  belonged  to  the  Forty 
Immortals  would  vote  for  him,  and  al- 
though he  believed  that  both  before  his 
candidacy  and  after  his  election  he  could 
criticise  the  plays  of  these  dramatists  as 
freely  as  he  did  now,  yet  he  did  not  be- 
lieve that  the  public  would  credit  him 
with  this  fortitude.  "  The  authority  of 
the  critic  lies  in  the  confidence  of  the  pub- 
lic," he  wrote ;  and  if  the  public  doubted 
whether  he  would  speak  the  truth  and 
the  whole  truth  as  frankly  after  he  had 
been  a  candidate  or  after  he  had  become 
an  Academician,  his  opinion  would  lose 
half  its  weight.  To  guard  his  freedom 


he  told  me  once  he  had  refused  all  hon- 
ors, even  the  cross  of  the  Legion  of  Honor. 
He  declared  in  this  letter  that  he  hesi- 
tated long,  and  that  he  knew  the  sacrifice 
he  was  making.  If  journalism  had  been 
without  a  representative  in  the  Academy, 
perhaps  he  might  have  felt  it  his  duty  to 
be  a  candidate,  but  John  Lemoinne  was 
one  of  the  Forty,  and  there  were  already 
two  or  three  other  journalists  drawing 
nigh  to  the  Academy,  "  who  will  fill  most 
brilliantly  the  place  I  give  up  to  them." 
He  concluded  by  declaring  that  his  am- 
bition was  to  have  on  his  tombstone  the 
two  words  which  would  sum  up  his  ca- 
reer— "  Professor  and  Journalist." 

He  began  as  a  professor,  as  a  teacher 
in  the  schools,  and  now  for  thirty  years 
he  has  been  a  journalist,  a  teacher  in  the 
newspapers,  loving  his  work,  and  doing  it 
with  a  conscience  and  a  fidelity  which 
make  it  an  honor  to  the  modern  news- 
paper. 

1890. 


II.— M.  JULES    LEMAITRE 

IN  the  evolution  of  literature  three 
kinds  of  critics  have  been  developed. 
First  in  point  of  time  came  the  critic 
who  spoke  as  one  having  authority,  who 
appealed  to  absolute  standards  of  taste, 
who  had  no  doubt  as  to  the  force  of 
his  criterions,  who  judged  according  to 
the  strict  letter  of  the  law,  and  who 
willingly  advised  a  poet  to  put  his  Peg- 
asus out  to  grass  or  ordered  a  writer  of 
prose  to  send  his  stalking-horse  to  the 
knacker.  This  critic  believed  in  definite 
legislation  for  literature,  and  sometimes — 
when  his  name  was  Aristotle  or  Horace, 
Boileau  or  Pope  —  he  codified  the  scat- 
tered laws,  that  all  might  obey  them  un- 
derstandingly.  Macaulay  was  the  last 
English  critic  of  this  class,  and  even  now 
many  of  his  minor  imitators  hand  down 
their  hebdomadal  judgments  in  the  broad 
columns  of  British  weeklies.  In  France 
there  is  to-day  a  man  of  force,  acuteness, 
and  individuality,  M.  Ferdinand  Brune- 


tiere,  who  accepts  this  outworn  creed  of 
criticism,  and  who  acts  up  to  it  conscien- 
tiously in  the  Revue  des  Deitx  Mondes. 

The  papal  infallibility  of  the  Essay  on 
Criticism  began  to  be  doubted  towards  the 
end  of  the  last  century.  Lessing,  for  one, 
had  impulses  of  revolt  against  the  rigid- 
ity of  the  rules  by  which  literature  was 
limited;  but  the  German  protest  of  the 
Schlegels,  for  instance,  was  rather  against 
the  restrictions  of  French  criticism  than 
against  a  narrow  method  of  appreciating 
poetry.  Like  the  Irish  clergyman  who 
declared  himself  willing  to  "  renounce  the 
errors  of  the  Church  of  Rome  and  to 
adopt  those  of  the  Church  of  England," 
most  of  the  writers  who  refused  to  be 
judged  by  the  precepts  of  Classicism  were 
ready  to  apply  with  equal  rigor  the  rules 
of  Romanticism.  But  in  time,  out  of  the 
welter  and  struggle  of  faction  came  a  per- 
ception of  a  new  truth — that  it  is  the  task 
of  the  critic  not  to  judge,  but  to  examine, 
to  inquire,  to  investigate,  to  see  the  ob- 
ject as  it  really  is  and  to  consider  it 
with  disinterested  curiosity.  This  Sainte- 
Beuve  attempted,  though  even  he  did  not 


always  attain  to  the  lofty  ideal  he  pro- 
claimed ;  and  to  the  same  chilly  height 
Matthew  Arnold  tried  to  reach,  saying 
that  he  wished  to  decide  nothing  as  of 
his  "  own  authority ;  the  great  art  of  crit- 
icism is  to  get  one's  self  out  of  the  way 
and  to  let  humanity  decide." 

The  phrase  which  Dr.  Waldstein  quoted 
from  Spinoza  not  long  ago  as  characteristic 
of  the  scientific  mind — Neque  flere,  neque 
rzdere,  neque  admirare,  neque  contemnere, 
sed  intelligere  (Neither  to  weep  nor  to 
laugh,  neither  to  admire  nor  to  despise, 
but  to  understand)  —  this  may  serve  to 
indicate  the  aim  of  scientific  criticism 
which  judges  not,  which  expresses  no 
opinions,  which  does  not  take  sides,  which 
merely  sets  down,  with  the  arid  precision 
of  an  affidavit,  the  facts  as  these  are  re- 
vealed by  a  qualitative  analysis.  Unfort- 
unately, criticism  as  impersonal  as  this 
is  impossible ;  no  man  can  make  a  mere 
machine  of  himself  to  register  in  vacua. 
"  If  there  were  any  recognized  standard 
in  criticism,  as  in  apothecaries'  measure, 
so  that,  by  adding  a  grain  of  praise  to 
this  scale  or  taking  away  a  scruple  of 


blame  from  that,  we  could  make  the  bal- 
ance manifestly  even  in  the  eyes  of  all  men, 
it  might  be  worth  while  to  weigh  Han- 
nibal," Mr.  Lowell  tells  us ;  "  but  when 
each  of  us  stamps  his  own  weights  and 
warrants  the  impartiality  of  his  own 
scales,  perhaps  the  experiment  may  be 
wisely  foregone." 

The  natural  reaction  from  an  impossibly 
callous  scientific  criticism  which  sought 
to  suppress  the  personality  of  the  critic 
was  a  criticism  which  was  frankly  indi- 
vidual. This  is  the  third  kind  of  criti- 
cism ;  it  abdicates  all  inherited  authority 
and  it  does  not  pretend  to  scientific  ex- 
actitude. It  recognizes  that  no  standard 
is  final,  and  that  there  is  no  disputing 
about  tastes.  It  is  aware  that  in  the 
higher  criticism  as  in  the  higher  educa- 
tion there  has  been  an  abolition  of  the 
marking  system,  and  that  the  critic  is  no 
longer  a  pedant  or  a  pedagogue  sending 
one  author  up  to  the  head  of  his  class 
and  setting  another  in  the  corner  with  a 
fool's  cap  on  his  brow.  It  declares  the 
honest  impression  of  the  individual  at 
the  moment  of  writing,  not  concealing 


the  fact  that  even  this  may  be  different 
at  another  time.  In  reality  Poe  was  a 
critic  of  this  type,  though  he  lacked 
frankness,  and  with  characteristic  char- 
latanry was  prompt  to  appeal  to  the 
immutable  standards  to  verify  his  own 
vagaries. 

The  three  types  of  criticism  have  been 
evolved  inevitably  one  out  of  the  other ; 
and  the  development  of  the  third  kind 
has  not  driven  out  the  practitioners  of 
the  first  and  second.  Critics  of  all  three 
classes  exist  at  present  side  by  side  in 
France,  England,  and  America,  disputing 
together  daily  in  the  schools.  Yet  the 
man  is  of  more  importance  than  the 
method ;  and  a  born  critic  can  bend  any 
theory  of  his  art  to  suit  his  purpose. 
Boileau  and  Sainte-Beuve  were  both  good 
critics,  and  Matthew  Arnold  was  a  good 
critic  ;  and  so  was  Lowell,  who  seemed 
rather  an  eclectic,  not  firm  in  following 
any  one  creed.  To  which  theory  a  man 
gives  in  allegiance  nowadays  is  mainly  a 
question  of  temperament.  In  France,  as 
it  happens,  the  most  brilliant  critic  of 
the  younger  generation,  M.Jules  Lernaitre, 


belongs  to  the  third  class.  M.  Lemaitre 
is  a  triumphant  exemplar  of  individual 
criticism,  giving  his  opinions  for  what 
they  are  worth,  and  presenting  them  so 
forcibly,  so  picturesquely,  so  pleasantly, 
that  at  least  they  are  always  worth  listen- 
ing to.  There  is  no  pose  in  his  frankness, 
and  his  apparent  inconsequence  is  open 
and  honest. 

In  some  respects  M.  Jules  Lemaitre  is 
a  typical  Frenchman  of  letters.  He  has 
the  ease,  the  grace,  the  wit,  the  lightness 
of  touch,  and  the  certainty  of  execution 
characteristic  of  the  best  French  authors. 
Behind  these  charms  he  has  the  love  of 
clearness,  of  order,  of  symmetry  — in  a 
word,  of  art— which  is  among  the  most 
marked  of  French  qualities.  He  dislikes 
extravagance  of  any  kind  ;  he  hates  harsh- 
ness, violence,  brutality.  He  inherits  the 
Latin  tradition,  and  he  has  fed  fat  on  the 
poetry  of  Greece  and  Rome.  He  has 
none  of  the  liking  of  his  contemporary, 
M.  Paul  Bourget,  for  foreign  countries,  and 
none  of  M.  Bourget's  curiosity  as  to  for- 
eign literature.  M.  Lemaitre  is  content 
to  have  M.  Pierre  Loti  do  his  travelling 


for  him,  or  to  let  Guy  de  Maupassant  go 
abroad  as  his  proxy. 

M.Jules  Lemaitre  has  not  yet  "come 
to  forty  years."  He  is  still  a  young  man. 
He  was  born  in  1853,  in  the  little  village 
of  Vennecy,  on  the  edge  of  the  forest  of 
Orleans.  He  attended  school  at  Orleans 
and  then  in  Paris,  and  when  he  was  nine- 
teen he  entered  the  Normal  School,  which 
of  late  years  has  given  many  a  brilliant 
man  to  French  literature.  In  1875,  at 
the  age  of  twenty -two,  he  was  gradu- 
ated from  the  Normal  School  with  high 
honors,  and  he  was  at  once  sent  to  the 
Lycee  of  Havre  as  professor  of  rhetoric. 
Here  he  stayed  five  years  teaching,  and 
yet  finding  time  to  write  that  first  volume 
of  verse  with  which  most  authors  begin 
their  literary  career. 

In  1880  he  published  these  poems,  and 
in  the  same  year  he  was  promoted  and 
sent  to  Algiers.  In  1883  he  brought  out 
a  second  book  of  rhymes,  and  he  pre- 
sented his  double  theses  to  the  Sorbonne, 
whereupon  he  was  made  a  doctor  of  let- 
ters. The  thesis  in  French,  a  study  of 
the  plays  of  Dancourt  and  of  the  course 


of  French  comedy  after  the  death  of  Mo- 
liere,  was  quite  unconventional  in  its  in- 
dividuality, as  any  one  may  see  now  that 
it  has  been  published.  He  was  again  pro- 
moted, but  he  already  thought  of  giving 
up  his  professorship  to  venture  into  liter- 
ature. In  1884  he  asked  for  leave  of  ab- 
sence and  went  to  Paris,  where  he  began 
to  contribute  regularly  to  the  Revue 
Bleue,  the  most  literary  and  the  most  in- 
dependent of  French  weekly  journals — 
as  far  as  may  be  the  Parisian  equiva- 
lent of  the  Nation.  In  a  very  few  weeks 
he  made  his  name  known  to  all  the  Pa- 
risians who  care  for  literature.  His  acute 
analysis  of  Renan  was  the  first  of  his  es- 
says to  attract  general  attention  ;  and 
when  he  followed  this  up  with  equally 
incisive  studies  of  M.  Zola  and  of  M. 
Georges  Ohnet,  he  was  at  once  accepted 
as  one  of  the  most  acute  of  contempo- 
rary French  critics.  As  one  of  his  biog- 
raphers declares,  "  He  was  unknown  in 
October,  1884,  and  in  December  he  was 
famous."  A  few  months  later,  when  J.  J. 
Weiss  resigned,  M.  Lemaitre  was  appoint- 
ed dramatic  critic  of  the  Journal  des 


Debats,  the  position  long  held  by  Jules 
Janin. 

His  contributions  to  the  Revue  Bleue 
M.  Lemaitre  has  four  times  gathered 
into  volumes  sent  forth  under  the  same 
title,  Les  Contemporains.  Selections  from 
his  weekly  articles  in  the  Debats  have 
also  been  collected  in  successive  volumes 
called  Impressions  de  Theatre.  The  titles 
he  has  given  to  these  two  series  of  his 
criticisms  reveal  the  aim  of  M.  Lemai- 
tre and  his  range.  Those  whom  he  crit- 
icises are  chiefly  his  contemporaries,  or 
at  furthest  those  who  have  deeply  and 
immediately  influenced  the  men  of  to- 
day ;  and  the  criticisms  themselves  are 
chiefly  his  impressions.  M.  Lemaitre  is  a 
man  of  the  nineteenth  century,  first  of  all, 
and  he  tells  his  fellow-men  how  the  books 
and  the  plays  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
the  authors  and  the  actors,  affect  him, 
how  they  move  him — in  short,  how  they 
impress  him  at  the  moment  regardless  of 
any  change  of  opinion  which  may  come 
to  him  in  the  future. 

Sainte  -  Beuve  protests  against  those 
who  borrow  ready-made  opinions,  and  it 


159 

must  be  admitted  that  more  often  than 
not  a  ready-made  opinion  is  a  misfit. 
M.  Jules  Lemaitre  has  his  opinions  made 
to  measure,  and  as  soon  as  he  outgrows 
them  they  are  cast  aside.  While  he  wears 
them  they  are  his  own,  and  neither  in 
cut,  cloth,  nor  style  are  they  common- 
place. He  has  the  double  qualification 
of  the  true  critic — insight  and  equipment. 
He  has  humor  and  good-humor,  and  he 
enjoys  the  play  of  his  own  wit.  He  is  a 
scholar  who  is  often  as  lively  and  as  law- 
less as  a  schoolboy.  He  is  at  once  a  man 
of  letters  and  a  man  of  the  world.  He 
hates  the  smell  of  the  lamp,  and  his 
best  work  has  the  flavor  of  the  good  talk 
that  may  go  up  the  chimney  when  there 
is  a  wood  fire  on  the  hearth.  As  he 
gained  experience  and  authority  he  has 
become  less  emphatic,  and  he  hesitates 
more  before  coming  to  definite  conclu- 
sions. The  certainty  of  conviction  which 
he  brought  with  him  from  the  provinces 
has  given  way  to  a  more  Parisian  scepti- 
cism. His  earlier  criticisms  were  all  solid- 
ly constructed  and  stood  four-square. 
Renan,  M.  Georges  Ohnet,  and  M.  Zola 


were  never  in  any  doubt  as  to  his  final 
opinion. 

The  later  criticisms  are  more  individ- 
ual, more  "personal" — as  the  French  say 
— more  impressionist,  than  the  earlier.  M. 
Lemaitre  is  quite  aware  that  the  shield  is 
silver  on  one  side  and  gold  on  the  other, 
and  he  is  no  longer  willing  to  break  a 
lance  for  either  metal,  whichever  may  be 
nearer  to  him.  He  is  open-minded,  he 
sees  both  sides  at  once,  and  he  sets  down 
both  the  pro  and  the  con,  sometimes  de- 
clining to  express  his  own  ultimate  opin- 
ion, sometimes  even  refusing  to  form  any 
opinion  at  all.  He  is  fond  of  setting  up  a 
man  of  straw  to  act  as  the  devil's  advo- 
cate ;  but  though  this  insures  a  full  hear- 
ing of  the  witnesses  for  the  defence  as 
well  as  for  the  prosecution,  it  rarely  pre- 
vents M.  Lemaitre  from  getting  his  saint, 
after  all,  when  he  is  resolute  for  the  beat- 
ification. Now  and  again  he  seems  in- 
different, and  he  remains  "on  the  fence," 
as  we  Yankees  say,  or  rather  on  both  sides 
of  it  at  once.  His  attitude  then  is  that 
of  a  lazy  judge  leaving  the  whole  burden 
of  decision  on  the  jury.  Yet  he  is  prompt 


enough,  as  the  essays  on  M.  Daudet's  "  Im- 
mortel,"  M.  Zola's  "  Reve,"  Victor  Hugo's 
"  Toute  la  Lyre,"  in  the  fourth  series,  show 
plainly,  when  his  opinion  is  clear  and  sim- 
ple. This  is  evidence,  were  any  needed, 
that  behind  the  hesitation  and  the  appar- 
ent indifference  there  is  a  live  interest  in 
literature,  a  real  love  for  what  is  true,  gen- 
uine, hearty,  and  a  sharp  hatred  for  shams. 
His  hatred  of  shams  is  shown  in  his 
swift  condemnation  of  M.  Georges  Oh- 
net's  romances,  perhaps  unduly  ferocious 
in  manner,  although  indisputably  de- 
served. M.  Georges  Ohnet  is  the  most 
popular  of  French  novelists ;  his  stories 
sell  by  the  hundred  thousand,  and  he  oc- 
cupies the  place  in  France  which  the  late 
E.  P.  Roe  held  in  America,  and  which  Mr. 
Rider  Haggard  holds  now  in  England. 
There  had  been  a  general  silence  in  the 
French  press  about  M.  Ohnet's  novels; 
no  one  praised  them  highly,  but  they 
pleased  the  public — or,  at  least,  the  half- 
educated  and  really  illiterate  mass  of  nov- 
el readers.  M.  Lemaitre  felt  the  revolt 
of  a  scholar  of  refined  tastes  and  delicate 
instincts  against  the  overpowering  popu- 


larity  of  M.  Ohnet's  empty  triviality,  and 
in  a  memorable  article  he  "belled  the 
cat"  and  he  "  rang  the  bell."  Never  was 
such  an  execution  since  Macaulay  slew 
Montgomery.  M.  Lemaitre  began  by  say- 
ing that  he  was  in  the  habit  of  discussing 
literary  subjects,  but  he  hoped  that  he 
would  be  pardoned  if  he  spoke  now  of 
the  novels  of  M.  Georges  Ohnet ;  and  then 
he  went  on  to  hold  up  to  scorn  the  feeble 
style  of  M.  Ohnet,  the  merely  mechanical 
structure  of  his  stories,  the  conventional- 
ity of  his  characters  and  their  falsity  to 
humanity,  the  barren  absurdity  of  his  phi- 
losophy of  life  and  the  baseness  of  his  ap- 
peal to  the  prejudices  of  the  middle  class, 
wherein  he  sought  for  readers.  In  gen- 
eral, M.  Lemaitre  is  keen  of  fence,  and  his 
weapon  is  the  small  sword  of  the  duelling 
field ;  but  to  M.  Ohnet  he  took  a  single- 
stick or  a  quarter-staff,  and  with  this  he 
beat  his  victim  black  and  blue,  breaking 
more  than  one  bone. 

Longfellow  tells  us  that  "  a  young  critic 
is  like  a  boy  with  a  gun  ;  he  fires  at  every 
living  thing  he  sees  ;  he  thinks  only  of  his 
own  skill,  not  of  the  pain  he  is  giving." 


M.  Lemaitre  was  a  young  critic  when  he 
wrote  this  crushing  assault  on  M.  Ohnet. 
Since  then  he  has  never  attempted  to  re- 
peat the  experience ;  it  is  true  that  there 
is  in  France  to-day  no  other  subject  as 
good  as  M.  Ohnet  for  a  severe  critic  to  try 
his  hand  on.  Of  late  when  M.  Lemaitre 
has  had  to  express  a  hostile  opinion  he 
has  been  more  indirect ;  and  now  he  draws 
blood  by  a  dexterous  insinuation  adroitly 
thrust  under  his  adversary's  sword  arm. 
Ill-disguised  was  his  contempt  for  Albert 
Wolff,  a  Parisian  from  Cologne,  a  writer  of 
chroniques  for  the  Figaro  —  most  perish- 
able of  all  articles  de  Paris — one  who  is  to 
journalism  what  M.  Georges  Ohnet  is  to 
literature.  Ill-disguised  is  his  condemna- 
tion of  the  part  M.  Henri  Rochefort  has 
played  in  the  French  politics  of  the  past 
quarter  of  a  century,  and  bitterly  incisive 
—  corrosive  almost  —  is  the  outline  he 
etches  of  the  character  of  the  man  with 
the  immitigable  grin,  the  man  whose Lan- 
terne  helped  to  light  the  fall  of  the  sec- 
ond empire,  the  man  who  has  since  egged 
on  every  revolt,  however  bloody,  however 
hopeless,  however  foolish. 


164 

Of  these  adverse  criticisms  there  are 
very  few  indeed — a  scant  half-dozen,  per- 
haps— in  the  threescore  essays  contained 
in  volumes  of  Les  Contemporains.  This 
is  as  it  should  be,  for  he  is  a  very  narrow 
critic  indeed  who  deals  more  in  blame 
than  in  praise.  For  criticism  to  be  profit- 
able and  pregnant,  the  critic  must  needs 
dwell  on  the  works  he  admires.  Merely 
negative  criticism  is  sterile.  The  late 
Edmond  Scherer  said  that  "the  ideal  of 
criticism  was  to  be  able  to  praise  cordially 
and  with  enthusiasm,  if  need  be,  without 
losing  one's  head  or  getting  blind  to  de- 
fects." 

Nothing  is  more  needful  for  a  critic 
than  sympathy  with  his  subject.  The 
faculty  of  appreciation,  of  hearty  admi- 
ration, of  contagious  enthusiasm  even,  is 
among  the  best  gifts  of  a  true  critic  ;  and 
this  M.  Lemaitre  has  in  abundance.  He 
likes  the  best  and  the  best  only,  but  this 
he  likes  superlatively.  And  he  can  see 
the  good  points  even  of  authors  who  do 
not  altogether  please  him ;  and  these  he  is 
always  ready  to  laud  in  hearty  fashion. 

"  Readers  like  to  find  themselves  more 


i65 


severe  than  the  critic ;  and  I  let  them  have 
this  pleasure,"  said  Sainte- Beuve.  M. 
Lemaitre  goes  far  beyond  his  great  pred- 
ecessor ;  he  delights  in  broad  eulogy  of 
those  who  appeal  to  his  delicate  sense  of 
the  exquisite  in  literary  art.  His  enjoy- 
ment of  "  Pierre  Loti,"  for  example,  of 
M.  Daudet's  Nabab,  of  Renan,  is  so  in- 
tense that  he  is  swept  off  his  feet  by  the 
strong  current  of  admiration.  But  though 
he  lose  his  feet  he  keeps  his  head,  and  in 
his  highest  raptures  he  is  never  uncritical. 
What  M.  Lemaitre  likes  best,  if  not  always 
the  books  best  worth  liking,  are  always 
at  least  books  well  worth  liking ;  and  he 
likes  them  for  what  is  best  in  them,  and 
never  for  their  affectations,  their  super- 
fluities, their  contortions ;  and  it  is  for 
these  often  that  many  a  critic  pretends  to 
worship  a  master.  M.  Lemaitre's  taste  is 
keen  and  fine  and  sure  ;  and  his  judgment 
is  solid. 

Although  M.  Lemaitre  knows  his  clas- 
sics—  Greek,  Latin,  and  French  —  as  be- 
comes a  Normalien,  he  likes  French  litera- 
ture better  than  Greek  or  Latin ;  and  he 
likes  the  French  literature  of  the  nine- 


teenth  century  better  than  that  of  the 
eighteenth,  or  even  of  the  seventeenth.  It 
is  his  contemporaries  who  most  interest 
him.  In  his  clear  and  subtle  and  respectful 
analysis  of  the  characteristics  of  his  fellow- 
critic  M.  Ferdinand  Brunetiere,  M.  Le- 
maitre  confesses  that  while  he  reads  Bos- 
suet  and  acknowledges  the  power  of  that 
most  eloquent  of  orators,  yet  the  reading 
gives  him  little  pleasure,  "  whereas  often 
on  opening  by  chance  a  book  of  to-day  or 
of  yesterday  "  he  thrills  with  delight ;  and 
he  calls  on  M.  Brunetiere  to  set  off  one 
century  against  the  other.  "  If,  perhaps, 
Corneille,  Racine,  Bossuet  have  no  equiv- 
alents to-day,  the  great  century  had  the 
equivalent  of  Lamartine,  of  Victor  Hugo, 
of  Musset,  of  Michelet,  of  George  Sand,  of 
Sainte-Beuve,  of  Flaubert,  of  M.  Renan  ? 
And  is  it  my  fault  if  I  would  rather  read 
a  chapter  of  M.  Renan  than  a  sermon  of 
Bossuet,  the  Nabab  than  the  Princess  of 
Cleves,  and  a  certain  comedy  of  Meilhac 
and  Halevy  even  than  a  comedy  of  Mo- 
liere?" 

It  is  this,  I  think,  which  gives  to  M.  Le- 
maitre's  criticism  much  of  its  value — his 


i67 


intense  liking  for  the  French  literature  of 
to-day,  and  his  perfect  understanding  of 
its  moods  and  of  its  methods.  He  has  an 
extraordinary  dexterity  in  plucking  out 
the  heart  of  technical  mysteries.  In  con- 
sidering a  little  book  of  sayings  he  took 
occasion  to  declare  the  theory  of  maxim 
making,  whereby  every  man  may  be  his 
own  La  Rochefoucauld,  and  he  supplied 
an  abundance  of  bright  examples  manu- 
factured according  to  his  new  formulas. 
In  like  manner  he  discovered  the  trick  of 
the  rhythms  and  rhymes  of  Theodore  de 
Banville,  the  reviver  of  the  rondeau  and 
of  the  ballade,  and  a  past-master  of  verbal 
jugglery  and  of  acrobatic  verse. 

In  peering  into  the  methods  of  more 
important  literary  workmen  he  is  equally 
acute.  Take,  for  example,  his  study  of  M. 
Zola  —  perhaps  the  most  acute  and  the 
most  respectful  analysis  of  M.  Zola's  very 
remarkable  powers  to  be  found  anywhere ; 
more  elaborate  than  the  excellent  essay 
written  by  Mr.  Henry  James  when  Nana 
was  published.  M.  Zola  is  a  novelist  with 
a  theory  of  his  art  violently  promulgated 
and  turbulently  reiterated  until  most  peo- 


i68 


pie  were  ready  to  accept  his  own  word 
for  his  work,  and  to  regard  his  romances 
as  examples  of  the  Naturalism  he  pro- 
claimed. Now  and  then  an  adverse  critic 
dwelt  on  the  inconsistencies  between  M. 
Zola's  theory  and  his  practice,  and  M.  Zola 
himself  bemoaned  the  occasional  survivals 
of  the  Romanticist  spirit  he  detected  in 
himself.  M.  Lemaitre  began  by  thrusting 
this  aside,  and  by  painting  M.  Zola  in  his 
true  colors  with  a  bold  sweep  of  the  brush. 
"  M.  Zola,"  he  declared,  "  is  not  a  critic, 
and  he  is  not  a  Naturalistic  novelist  in  the 
meaning  he  himself  gives  to  the  term. 
But  M.  Zola  is  an  epic  poet  and  a  pessi- 
mistic poet.  .  .  .  By  poet  I  mean  a  writer 
who  in  virtue  of  an  idea  .  .  .  notably 
transforms  reality,  and  having  so  trans- 
formed it  gives  it  life."  M.  Lemaitre 
then  shows  us  the  simple  but  powerful 
mechanism  of  M.  Zola's  art — how  he  takes 
a  theme  and  sets  it  before  the  reader  with 
broad  strokes  and  with  typical  characters 
boldly  differentiated  and  reduced  almost 
to  their  elements,  but  none  the  less  alive. 
Space  fails  here  to  show  how  M.  Lemaitre 
works  out  most  convincingly  the  substan- 


i69 


tial  identity  of  M.  Zola's  massive  method 
with  that  of  the  epic  poet,  and  how  he 
discovers  in  every  one  of  M.  Zola's  later 
fictions  a  Beast,  a  huge  symbol  of  the 
theme  which  that  story  sets  forth,  and  a 
Chorus  which  comments  upon  the  events 
and  brings  them  nearer  to  the  reader. 

The  essay  may  be  recommended  to  all 
who  have  a  taste  for  criticism ;  I  know 
nothing  at  once  more  acute,  more  orig- 
inal, or  truer.  It  may  be  recommended 
especially  to  those  who  would  like  to 
know  what  manner  of  writer  M.  Zola  is, 
and  who  yet  shrink  from  the  reading  of 
his  novels,  often  drawn  out  and  weari- 
some, and  nearly  always  foul  and  repul- 
sive. It  is  M.  Zola's  misfortune — and  it 
is  indubitably  his  own  fault — that  he  is 
judged  by  hearsay  often,  and  that  his  books 
are  taken  as  the  types  of  filthy  fiction. 
Perhaps  he  is  more  frequently  condemned 
than  read — although  sometimes  the  Brit- 
ish abuse  of  his  books  has  struck  me  as 
the  reaction  of  guilty  enjoyment.  Occa- 
sion serves  to  say  in  parentheses  here 
that  while  M.  Zola's  forcible  and  effec- 
tive novels  are  painful  often,  while  they 


are  dirty  frequently  and  indefensibly, 
they  are  not  immoral.  It  is  rather  in 
Octave  Feuillet's  rose-colored  novels  or 
in  M.  Georges  Ohnet's  gilt-edged  fictions 
that  we  may  seek  insidious  immorality. 

M.  Lemaitre  indicates  the  misplaced 
dirt  in  M.  Zola's  novels,  and  obviously 
enough  is  himself  a  man  of  clean  mind  ; 
but  perhaps  he  lacks  the  inherent  stern- 
ness of  morality  which  in  a  man  of  Anglo- 
Saxon  stock  would  go  with  an  upright 
character  like  his.  He  has  a  respectful 
regard  for  the  Don  Juan  of  Moliere  and 
of  Mozart,  of  Byron  and  of  Musset ;  and 
he  has  a  kindly  tolerance  for  the  dis- 
ciples of  Don  Juan  who  infest  French 
literature. 

M.  Lemaitre's  dramatic  criticisms,  his 
Impressions  de  Theatre,  are  quite  as  orig- 
inal as  his  more  solid  literary  portraits, 
quite  as  fresh,  quite  as  individual,  quite 
as  amusing.  He  lacks  the  profound 
knowledge  of  the  conditions  of  dramatic 
art,  the  extraordinary  insight  into  the 
necessary  conventions  upon  which  it  is 
based,  the  thorough  acquaintance  with 
the  history  of  the  theatre  in  France, 


which  have  given  to  the  foremost  theatri- 
cal critic  of  our  time,  M.  Francisque  Sar- 
cey,  his  unexampled  authority.  But  he 
looks  at  the  stage  always  through  his 
own  eyes,  never  through  the  opera-glass 
of  his  neighbor  or  the  spectacles  of  tra- 
dition. He  is  fond  of  the  theatre,  and 
yet  he  readily  goes  outside  of  its  walls 
and  considers  not  merely  the  technic  of 
the  dramatist  but  also  the  ethics.  Like 
most  well-equipped  and  keen-witted  crit- 
ics, his  criticism  willingly  broadens  its 
vision  to  consider  life  as  well  as  litera- 
ture. Of  the  conventionalities  and  the 
concessions  to  chance  which  the  writer 
of  comedy  avails  himself  freely,  M.  Le- 
maitre  is  tolerant,  and  wisely ;  but  he  is 
intolerant  and  implacable  towards  the 
false  psychology  and  the  defective  ethics 
of  the  mere  playwright  who  twists  char- 
acters and  misrepresents  humanity  to 
gain  an  effect. 

The  critic  of  the  Debats  is  not  content 
with  describing  the  dramas  of  the  leading 
theatres  of  Paris ;  he  has  a  Thackerayan 
fondness  for  spectacles  of  all  kinds,  for 
the  ballet,  for  the  circus  and  the  panto- 


mime,  for  side-shows,  for  freaks  of  every 
degree.  In  all  these  he  finds  unfailing 
amusement  and  an  unflagging  variety  of 
impressions.  He  is  always  alert,  lively, 
gay ;  and  though  he  travels  far  afield,  he 
is  never  at  his  wits'  end.  In  his  dramat- 
ic criticisms  M.  Lemaitre  appears  to  me 
as  a  serious  student  of  literature  and  of 
life,  playing  the  part  of  a  Parisian — and 
it  is  a  most  excellent  impersonation. 

Of  M.  Lemaitre's  poems,  there  is  no 
need  to  say  anything ;  they  are  the  verses 
of  a  very  clever  man,  no  doubt,  but  not 
those  of  a  born  poet.  They  shine  with 
the  reflected  light  of  his  work  in  prose. 
Gray  thought  "  even  a  bad  verse  as  good 
a  thing  or  better  than  the  best  observa- 
tion that  ever  was  made  upon  it " ;  but 
even  fairly  good  verse  is  not  as  good  a 
thing  as  the  best  observation  that  ever 
was  made  on  the  best  verse.  It  is  the 
prose  and  not  the  verse  of  Lessing  and  of 
Sainte-Beuve  that  we  turn  to,  again  and 
again. 

Of  M.  Lemaitre's  stories  there  is  no 
need  to  say  much :  they  are  the  tales  of 
a  very  clever  man,  of  course,  but  not  those 


173 

of  a  born  teller  of  tales.  They  lack  a 
something  vague  and  indefinable — a  fla- 
vor, a  perfume,  an  aroma  of  vitality ;  it 
is  as  though  they  were  a  manufacture, 
rather,  and  not  a  growth.  They  are  not 
inevitable  enough.  They  are  naif  with- 
out being  quite  convincing.  They  have 
simplicity  of  motive,  harmony  of  con- 
struction, sharpness  of  outline,  touches 
of  melancholy  and  pathos,  unfailing  in- 
genuity and  wit — and  yet — and  yet —  Of 
the  stories  contained  in  the  beautifully 
illustrated  volume  called  Dtx  Contes  only 
three  or  four  are  modern,  and  even 
these  seem  to  have  a  hint  of  allegory  as 
though  there  were  perhaps  a  concealed 
moral  somewhere.  The  rest  are  tales  of 
once-upon-a-time,  in  Arabia,  in  Greece, 
in  Rome,  as  dissimilar  as  possible  from 
the  contes  of  M.  Daudet  or  of  Maupas- 
sant, of  M.  Coppee  or  of  M.  Halevy,  and 
with  a  certain  likeness  to  the  Contes 
Philosophies  of  Voltaire.  To  say  this 
is  to  suggest  that  they  are  rather  fables, 
apologues,  allegories,  than  short  stories. 

Of    M.    Lemaitre's    play,  "  Revoltee," 
there  is  no  need  to  say  more ;  it  is  the 


comedy  of  a  very  clever  man  indeed,  but 
not  that  of  a  born  playwright.  When 
acted  at  the  Odeon  in  1889  it  did  not  fail, 
but  it  did  not  prove  a  powerful  attraction. 
When  published — and  to  the  delight  of 
all  who  are  fond  of  the  drama  French 
plays  are  still  published  as  English  com- 
edies were  once — it  impressed  the  expert 
as  likely  to  read  better  than  it  acted. 
There  was  abundance  of  wit,  for  example, 
but  it  was  rather  the  wit  of  M.  Jules  Le- 
maitre  than  of  his  characters,  and  it  was 
rather  the  wit  of  the  study  than  of  the 
stage.  Yet  "  Revoltee  "  is  an  honorable 
attempt,  and  highly  interesting  to  all  who 
are  interested  in  M.  Lemaitre. 

To  sum  up  my  opinion  of  these  tenta- 
tive endeavors  in  other  departments  of 
literature,  M.  Lemaitre  is  a  very  clever 
man,  whose  cleverness  does  not  lead  him 
naturally  and  irresistibly  to  poetry  or  to 
story-telling  or  to  playwriting.  What  it 
does  lead  him  to  is  criticism — criticism 
of  literature  primarily,  because  he  loves 
letters,  but  criticism  also  of  life  at  large, 
of  man  and  his  manners,  his  motives,  his 
relation  to  the  world  and  to  the  universe. 


He  has  not  only  the  faculty  of  straight 
thinking,  but  also  that  of  plain  speaking. 
He  is  bold  and  direct  in  his  discussion  of 
social  problems,  applying  to  their  solu- 
tion an  unusual  common-sense,  and  de- 
veloping also  an  unusual  understanding 
of  the  causes  of  apparent  anomalies.  I 
do  not  know  anywhere  a  more  acute 
statement  of  the  relative  duty  of  faithful- 
ness on  the  part  of  husband  and  wife 
than  is  to  be  found  in  his  criticism  of 
the  "  Francillon  "  of  M.  Dumas  fits.  And 
that  this  statement  should  be  found  in  a 
theatrical  criticism  is  characteristic  of 
M.  Lemaitre's  attitude ;  as  his  vision 
broadens  and  his  interest  in  life  deepens, 
a  play  or  a  novel  is  to  him  chiefly  valua- 
ble as  the  theme  and  text  of  a  social 
inquiry.  Literature  alone  no  longer  satis- 
fies. 


ASIDES 

I.-SHAKSPERE,  MOLIERE,  AND  MODERN 
ENGLISH  COMEDY 

assert  that  modern  English 
comedy  owes  more  to  Mo- 
liere  than  it  does  to  Shak- 
spere  is  to  declare  a  fact,  and 
not  to  propound  a  paradox. 
The  influence  of  Shakspere  on  modern 
English  comedy,  on  the  comic  plays  acted 
in  England  during  the  past  two  centuries, 
is  indisputable,  of  course,  but  it  is  less  in 
quantity  and  less  in  quality  than  the  in- 
fluence of  Moliere.  It  would  be  easy  to 
go  through  the  list  of  the  successful  Eng- 
lish comedies  acted  since  the  death  of 
Shakspere,  and  to  pick  out  the  plays,  like 
Tobin's  "  Honeymoon  "  and  Knowles's 
"  Hunchback,"  written  consciously  in  the 
imitation — however  remote — of  the  Shak- 
sperian  manner.  It  would  not  be  easy  to 


name  half  of  the  English  comedies  whose 
form  and  substance  had  been  uncon- 
sciously moulded  by  the  example  of  Mo- 
liere.  The  explanation  of  the  seeming 
paradox  that  the  comic  dramatists  of 
England  have  been  more  beholden  to  the 
greatest  dramatist  of  France  than  to  the 
greatest  dramatist  of  England  is  not  far 
to  seek.  Indeed,  it  lies  in  a  nutshell. 
Modern  English  comedy  is  not  made  on 
the  model  of  Elizabethan  comic  drama, 
and  it  is  made — immorality  apart — on  the 
model  of  the  Restoration  comic  drama. 
Now  the  comic  dramatists  of  the  Resto- 
ration— immorality  apart — were  the  chil- 
dren of  Moliere.  Between  the  Eliza- 
bethan dramatists  and  the  dramatists  of 
the  Restoration  was  a  great  gulf ;  they 
did  not  think  alike ;  they  did  not  feel 
alike  ;  and  the  larger  manner  of  the  earlier 
writers  was  hopelessly  impossible  to  the 
younger.  (Dryden  is  an  exception ;  and 
Dryden  is  in  essentials  a  belated  Eliza- 
bethan ;  *at  times  he  ventured  to  draw 
from  the  nude,  and  some  of  the  naked 
wildness  of  mankind  got  into  his  work ; 
but  he  stood  alone  and  lonely  among  his 


i78 


contemporaries,  who  had  no  feeling  for 
the  nakedness  of  things,  and  whose  men 
and  women  were  all  clothed  and  in  their 
right  mind.)  The  vigorous  outline  and 
the  bold  stroke  of  the  Elizabethans  were 
not  only  impossible  but  even  repugnant 
to  the  Restoration  writers,  corrupted  as 
they  had  been  by  the  Classicism  of  the 
French  theatre.  They  were  no  longer 
large-minded  enough  to  take  in  the  great- 
er beauty  of  mighty  Elizabethans.  Yet 
they  were  men  of  understanding  and 
taste,  and  they  could  appreciate  to  the 
full  the  delicacy  and  restraint  and  con- 
centration of  the  new  French  comedy, 
which  Moliere  had  marked  with  his  image 
and  superscription.  Unfortunately  for 
themselves,  when  they  borrowed  the  point 
of  view  of  the  great  Frenchman  they  for- 
got to  borrow  his  sobriety  and  his  self- 
respect.  They  were  wholly  lacking  in  the 
skill  which  enabled  him  to  treat  with  del- 
icacy and  without  offence  a  risky  subject 
— and  there  are  few  subjects  more  risky 
than  that  of  the  "  Amphitryon,"  for  ex- 
ample. Where  Moliere  glided  gently  and 
with  skilful  step,  his  imitators  trod  clum- 


sily  and  crushingly ;  and  it  is  small  won- 
der that  they  soon  found  themselves  in 
the  mire.  They  had  a  keen  wit  and  a 
lively  humor  and  a  fertile  invention,  aid- 
ed when  it  flagged  by  reminiscences  of 
France ;  but  they  had  no  moral  taste,  no 
decency ;  and  their  plays  have  decayed 
rapidly  for  want  of  what  would  keep  them 
sweet.  But  as  manners  and  morals  im- 
proved, these  plays  of  the  Restoration 
writers  began  to  be  thrust  from  the  stage 
into  the  closets  of  librarians,  until  there 
is  scarcely  a  single  comic  drama  of  that 
period  holding  the  stage  to-day.  The 
play  -  goer  of  the  fourth  quarter  of  the 
nineteenth  century  has  scant  chance  to 
see  acted  any  comedy  of  Etherege,  Dry- 
den,  Shadwell,  Congreve,  Farquhar,  Wych- 
erley,  or  Vanbrugh. 

It  is  true,  also,  that  no  play  of  the  Eliza- 
bethan period  — save  Shakspere's  and  a 
single  piece  by  a  single  one  of  his  con- 
temporaries—  keeps  the  stage.  It  may 
be  that  we  should  be  as  much  shocked 
by  the  brutal  violence  of  the  minor  Eliza- 
bethans as  by  the  brutal  indecency  of  the 
minor  Restoration  writers.  The  fact  re- 


mains  that  the  play -goer  of  to-day  can 
never  hope  to  see  acted  any  play  of  Mar- 
lowe, Ford,  Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  Web- 
ster, Heywood,  Ben  Jonson,  Chapman,  or 
Shirley,  although  he  may  possibly  by  great 
good -luck  get  a  chance  now  and  again 
to  see  Massinger's  "  New  Way  to  Pay  Old 
Debts."  Yet  the  plays  of  some  of  these 
authors  have  died  hard.  There  is  still 
alive  an  American  actress  who  likes  to 
act  the  "  Duchess  of  Malfy,"  a  tissue  of 
freezing  horrors.  There  were  three  or 
four  other  of  the  plays  originally  acted 
under  "  Eliza  and  our  James,"  which  Mac- 
ready  tried  vainly  to  warm  over  when 
he  was  at  the  head  of  one  of  the  two 
great  theatres  of  London.  There  were 
barely  a  dozen  of  them  which  survived  to 
the  end  of  the  last  century,  and  which 
have  therefore  got  themselves  embalmed 
in  Mrs.  Inchbald's  "  British  Theatre  "  and 
in  the  kindred  collections.  Among  the 
plays  still  acted  at  the  beginning  of  this 
century  are  Ben  Jonson's  "  Alchymist " 
and  "  Every  Man  in  his  Humor,"  Beau- 
mont and  Fletcher's  "  Rule  a  Wife  and 
have  a  Wife  "  and  the  "  Chances,"  Shir- 


ley's  "  Edward  the  Black  Prince,"  and 
Massinger's  "  City  Madam,"  in  an  altera- 
tion of  which,  under  the  title  of "  Riches," 
Kean  used  to  act.  To  -  day  Massinger's 
"  New  Way  to  Pay  Old  Debts,"  and  per- 
haps six  out  of  Shakspere's  twelve  come- 
dies, are  all  we  have  to  represent  the 
comic  drama  of  Shakspere  and  his  con- 
temporaries. It  is  true  that  now  and 
then  a  venturesome  manager  may  risk  a 
little  money  in  mounting  one  of  the  other 
comedies  of  Shakspere,  but  the  experi- 
ment never  meets  with  popular  approval, 
and  the  revived  play  never  lives  with  its 
own  life ;  it  has  been  only  galvanized 
into  existence  ;  and  as  soon  as  the  unnat- 
ural stimulus  is  withdrawn  it  falls  back 
into  its  coffin. 

Thus  it  appears  that  the  Elizabethan 
dramatists — with  the  imposing  exception 
of  Shakspere — and  the  dramatists  of  the 
Restoration  have  alike  disappeared  from 
the  contemporary  stage.  But  while  the 
earlier  drama  has  passed  and  left  no  sign, 
the  later  has  imposed  its  form  on  all  the 
dramatic  writing  which  has  followed  it. 
Neither  the  serious  nor  the  comic  work 


1 82 


of  Shakspere  and  his  contemporaries  is  a 
potent  influence  on  the  drama  of  to-day. 
More's  the  pity,  one  may  say  ;  but  the 
fact  is  a  fact,  none  the  less.  Some  of  the 
tragic  writers  of  the  last  century — Otway, 
Southerne,  and  Rowe,  for  instance — reveal 
plainly  enough  their  obligation  to  their 
great  predecessors ;  but  popular  as  were 
"  Venice  Preserved  "  and  "  Isabella  "  and 
"  Jane  Shore  "  in  their  own  day  and  for 
many  a  long  day  afterwards,  they  are  pop- 
ular now  no  longer.  The  sole  surviving 
relics  of  Elizabethan  imitation  are  Sheil's 
"  Evadne  "  and  one  or  two  of  the  dramas 
of  Sheridan  Knowles ;  and  even  in  these 
the  imitation  is  little  more  than  skin-deep. 
In  comedy  the  case  is  fyuite  as  plain  as 
in  tragedy.  After  we  have  noted  Sheri- 
dan Knowles's  "  Love  Chase  "  and  Tobin's 
"  Honeymoon  " — which  is  imitated  rather 
from  Garrick's  "  Katharine  and  Petru- 
chio  "  than  from  Shakspere's  own  "  Tam- 
ing of  the  Shrew"  —  mention  has  been 
made  of  all  the  comedies  now  acted  which 
recall  even  faintly  the  method  and  man- 
ner of  the  master.  It  is,  indeed,  a  very 
strange  thing  that  the  delightful  comedy 


of  Shakspere,  the  wonderful  woodland 
wit  of  "As  You  Like  It,"  and  the  rich 
and  rollicking  humor  of  "  Twelfth  Night  " 
— a  wit  and  a  humor  ever  charged  with 
poetry,  and  as  free  and  as  fresh  in  this 
nineteenth  century  as  in  the  sixteenth 
— has  had  little  or  no  imitation  from  any 
of  the  long  line  of  comic  dramatists  who 
hold  their  own  briskly  and  brilliantly  in 
the  records  of  English  literature.  But 
so  it  is.  The  comedy  of  Shakspere  has 
been  almost  without  influence  on  the  rest 
of  English  comedy.  To  find  its  true  suc- 
cessor we  must  needs  cross  the  Chan- 
nel to  France  and  consider  carefully  the 
very  curious  likeness  of  certain  of  Mus- 
set's  comedies — "On  ne  badine  pas  avec 
1'amour"  for  example,  or  the  "Chande- 
lier," or  the  "  Caprices  de  Marianne."  It 
is  the  comparison  of  a  little  thing  with  a 
great,  no  doubt;  yet  is  not  Mr.  James 
right  when  he  detects  in  the  quality  of 
Musset's  fancy  something  that  reminds 
him  of  Shakspere  ?  Surely  if  any  one  is 
curious  to  know  how  things  have  gone 
on  in  that  Bohemia  which  is  a  desert 
country  by  the  sea,  he  can  do  worse  than 


i84 

devote  himself  to  the  dramas  of  Musset, 
and  he  will  find  in  them  at  least  a  trace 
of  the  lyric  sweetness  which  makes  all  of 
us  long  to  blaze  our  way  through  the  for- 
est of  Arden. 

The  comedy  of  Ben  Jonson,  of  which 
"  Every  Man  in  His  Humor"  is  the  con- 
summate type,  has  had  almost  as  little 
influence  on  its  present  successors  as  the 
more  ethereal  and  poetic  comedy  of  Shak- 
spere.  The  comedy  of  "  humors,"  of  the 
powerful  presentation  of  comic  character 
and  the  pushing  of  characteristics  to  the 
very  verge  of  caricature,  made  a  better 
fight  for  the  right  to  exist  than  any  other 
dramatic  form  of  the  time.  Even  after 
Etherege  with  his  "  Comical  Revenge ; 
or,  Love  in  a  Tub  "  had  set  the  example 
of  a  simpler  and  more  effective  devel- 
opment of  character  in  emulation  of  the 
comedy  of  Moliere — even  after  Etherege 
had  been  followed  by  Dryden  and  by  Con- 
greve,  Vanbrugh,  Wycherley,  and  Far- 
quhar,  not  only  did  the  comedies  of  Jon- 
%son  continue  to  be  acted,  but  later  writers 
— like  Shadwell — still  imitated  his  exhi- 
bition of  "  humors."  Although  the  school 


•85 


died  hard,  die  it  did  at  last  —  but  for  a 
time  only.  Obviously  there  was  in  it 
some  element  consonant  with  the  nation- 
al characteristics.  It  was  not  seen  again 
in  English  literature  until  Smollett  began 
to  write  novels  suggested  by  the  French 
"  Gil  Bias  "  (itself  greatly  indebted  to  the 
Spanish).  Smollett's  humor  was  both 
broad  and  elaborate,  and  it  had  a  cer- 
tain rough  resemblance  to  Ben  Jonson's. 
Smollett  exerted  a  baleful  influence  on 
George  Colman  the  Younger,  whose  very 
comic  and  very  careless  plays  are  filled 
with  characters  so  sharply  outlined  as  to 
be  almost  silhouette  caricatures.  Smol- 
lett's greater  rival,  Fielding,  brought  up 
on  Moliere,  has  been  followed  by  Sheri- 
dan. In  our  century,  again,  the  comic 
formulas  of  Ben  Jonson  and  Smollett  have 
been  expanded  by  Dickens,  whose  influ- 
ence was  felt  at  once  on  the  contemporary 
stage.  Thackeray,  on  the  other  hand, 
traces  his  descent  through  Fielding  from 
Moliere.  The  two  schools  are  irrecon- 
cilable, and  between  them  is  an  irrepressi- 
ble conflict.  The  comedy  of  the  present 
day  is  in  some  measure  a  compromise 


1 86 


between  the  opposing  schools.  The  form 
of  the  better  class  of  comedy  is  Molierean, 
and  all  of  the  higher  and  important  char- 
acters are  cast  in  the  Molierean  mould, 
while  the  lower  characters,  the  comic 
servants  and  scolding  women,  are  likely 
to  have  some  survival  of  the  "humors" 
of  Ben  Jonson  and  of  the  kindred  carica- 
tural  methods  of  his  followers,  Smollett 
and  Dickens. 

The  reason  why  the  influence  of  Moliere 
is  more  potent  on  the  form  of  English 
comedy  than  the  influence  of  Shakspere 
is  not  far  to  seek.  It  is  that  Moliere  rep- 
resents a  later  stage  of  the  development 
of  play-making.  In  outward  structure  the 
plays  of  the  great  French  dramatists  who 
wrote  under  Louis  XIV.  are  more  sym- 
metrical and  better  built  than  the  plays 
of  the  great  English  dramatists  who  wrote 
under  Elizabeth  and  James  I.  Not  only 
is  the  external  form  simpler  and  clearer, 
but  the  internal  unity  is  in  general  more 
marked.  It  is  hard  to  say  just  what  is 
the  subject  of  many  Elizabethan  dramas ; 
there  is  never  any  difficulty  in  declaring 


i87 


at  once  the  subject  of  any  drama,  comic 
or  tragic,  by  Corneille,  Moliere,  or  Racine. 
The  English  play  is  often  rough  and 
rugged  even  when  it  is  not  formless  and 
shapeless.  The  French  play  is  always 
smooth  and  sharply  outlined  and  logical- 
ly complete.  The  English  poet  gives  us 
only  too  often  an  inchoate  and  incon- 
gruous mass  of  poetic  matter,  a  rude  lump 
of  ore,-  from  which  we  must  disengage 
the  precious  metal  as  best  we  may.  The 
French  poet  is  not  as  rich  and  he  is  not 
as  free-handed ;  he  fuses  his  ore  and  re- 
fines his  gold  and  beats  it  thin  and  pol- 
ishes it  and  fashions  it  curiously.  In 
looking  at  the  English  drama  of  the 
Shaksperian  epoch,  the  prevailing  impres- 
sion one  gets  is  an  impression  of  main 
strength,  of  rude  vigor,  of  native  wildness 
and  profusion.  In  looking  at  the  French 
drama  of  the  Molierean  epoch,  the  pre- 
vailing impression  is  an  impression  of 
firm  and  delicate  art.  To  write  in  the 
Elizabethan  manner  is  tolerable  only  in 
those  who  have  the  lofty  stature  and 
giant  grasp  of  the  Elizabethans.  In  mere 
mass  of  native  ability  the  authors  around 


Shakspere  were  greater  than  the  authors 
around  Moliere ;  and  yet  nowadays  writers 
for  the  stage  will  do  better  if  they  rather 
avail  themselves  of  the  more  orderly 
methods  of  the  contemporaries  of  Mo- 
liere. But  even  in  France  comedy  was 
far  more  vigorous  than  tragedy;  while 
there  is  a  long  stride  from  Corneille  and 
Racine  to  Victor  Hugo,  Moliere  was  fol- 
lowed by  Regnard,  Marivaux,  Lesage,  and 
Beaumarchais.  In  England  the  imitation 
of  French  tragic  models  was  short-lived, 
while  the  use  of  the  French  formula  of 
comedy,  expanded  to  suit  English  tastes, 
continues  to  this  day. 

The  cause  of  the  abiding  influence  of 
Moliere  and  of  the  fading  influence  of 
Shakspere  is  to  be  sought,  I  think,  in  the 
changes  in  the  physical  conditions  of  the 
stage.  Moliere  began  to  write  half  a 
century  after  Shakspere  ceased  to  write ; 
and  in  that  half-century  many  and  marked 
changes  had  taken  place  in  the  arrange- 
ment and  constitution  of  the  theatre. 
Shakspere  acted  in  a  theatre  bearing  a 
very  close  resemblance  to  the  court  of  an 
inn — from  which,  indeed,  it  was  an  evolu- 


i89 


tion  ;  his  plays  were  performed  on  a  pro- 
jecting platform  before  a  turbulent  throng 
standing  and  brawling  in  the  pit,  scarcely 
sheltered  from  the  sun  and  rain.  Mo- 
Here  acted  in  a  theatre,  well  roofed,  water- 
tight, made  over  from  a  tennis-court ;  and 
his  plays  were  performed  before  and  be- 
tween rows  of  seated  courtiers,  often  in 
the  presence  of  the  courteous  king.  The 
stage  appliances  of  Shakspere's  time  were 
so  few  and  scanty  as  to  be  alm'ost  wholly 
absent.  The  stage-machinery  which  Mo- 
liere could  command  and  of  which  he 
made  use  in  the  "Festin  de  Pierre"  was 
elaborate  and  differed  but  little  from  that 
now  available.  In  fact,  the  difference  be- 
tween the  theatre  as  organized  in  the  time 
of  Shakspere  and  the  theatre  as  organized 
in  the  time  of  Moliere  is  enormous  and 
radical  ;  whereas  the  difference  between 
the  theatre  as  it  was  organized  in  the 
time  of  Moliere  and  as  it  is  organized  to- 
day is  unessential  and  insignificant.  The 
physical  conditions  of  the  stage  under 
Shakspere  are  altogether  other  than  those 
of  our  time,  while  the  physical  conditions 
of  the  stage  under  Moliere  are  substan- 


tially  identical  with  those  of  our  time. 
Therefore  is  it,  in  great  measure,  that  the 
only  English  comedies  which  have  sur- 
vived fitly  are  those  influenced  by  the  art 
of  Moliere  and  made  according  to  his 
formula  and  in  accord  with  the  environ- 
ment of  to-day. 

1883. 

II.— THE    "OLD   COMEDIES" 

EVERY  year  or  so  some  manager  in  New 
York  or  Boston  announces  a  series  of  re- 
vivals of  the  "  Old  Comedies."  Every  now 
and  again  the  theatrical  critics  of  these 
cities  are  moved  to  contrast — to  its  dis- 
advantage —  some  contemporary  comic 
drama  with  these  same  "  Old  Comedies." 
There  may  be,  therefore,  interest  in  an 
inquiry  as  to  these  "  Old  Comedies,"  their 
titles,  their  authors,  their  real  value,  and 
their  traditional  reputation. 

First  of  all,  what  are  the  "Old  Come- 
dies," as  the  term  is  used  by  the  theatrical 
critic  of  the  last  quarter  of  the  nineteenth 
century  ?  The  answer  to  this  question  is 


simple.  They  are  a  score  or  so  of  more  or 
less  comic  plays  written  by  various  English 
dramatists  at  intervals  during  the  hun- 
dred and  fifty  years  intervening  between 
1700  and  1850,  and  distinguished  from 
among  the  thousands  of  other  comic 
dramas  written  during  that  century  and 
a  half  by  the  fact  that  they  have  had  vi- 
tality enough  to  keep  the  stage.  In  all 
departments  of  literature  there  is  a  strug- 
gle for  existence,  and  the  acknowledged 
classics  are  the  results  of  the  survival  of 
the  fittest.  It  is  by  the  same  process  of 
natural  selection  that  twenty  or  thirty 
"  Old  Comedies  "  have  been  picked  out 
of  the  thousand  or  two  which  were  acted 
contemporaneously  with  them.  It  is  with 
these  picked  and  proved  troops  that  the 
new  English  or  American  comedy  is 
measured  ;  and  it  is  from  a  hasty  com- 
parison of  the  best  of  the  past  with  the 
average  of  the  present  that  the  decline 
of  the  drama  is  declared.  The  unfairness 
of  the  proceeding  needs  no  comment. 
When  beneficent  Time  has  thrashed  out 
the  dramatic  literature  of  our  day  it  will 
be  possible  to  winnow  comic  plays  written 


I92 


by  men  now  living,  which  in  due  season 
will  take  their  place  among  the  "Old 
Comedies,''  and  which  will  then  hold 
their  own  against  all  but  the  very  best  of 
their  companions.  And  as  the  best  of  the 
comedies  of  our  day  are  not  unequal  to 
the  best  of  the  comedies  of  the  past  cen- 
tury and  a  half,  so  the  worst  of  the  plays 
of  our  day  are  not  worse  than  the  worst 
of  the  plays  of  the  past.  The  ordinary 
play-goer  speaks  of  the  plays  of  the  past 
with  respect  because  he  is  ignorant  about 
them  and  takes  the  unknown  for  the  mag- 
nificent. The  ordinary  reader  lacks  cour- 
age to  attack  the  immense  mass  of  the 
plays  of  the  past.  There  was  in  the 
library  of  the  Reverend  Mr.  Arthur 
Dimmesdale  a  ponderous  tome  which  the 
historian  of  the  erring  clergyman's  strug- 
gles deems  to  have  been  "a  work  of  vast 
ability  in  the  somniferous  school  of  liter- 
ature." There  is  in  the  library  of  every 
dramatic  collector  a  series  of  collections 
of  little  volumes  containing  some  few 
chosen  samples  of  the  plays  of  the  past; 
and  the  contents  of  these  little  volumes 
are  of  a  certainty  closely  akin  to  the  con- 


tents  of  the  ponderous  tome,  in  that  they 
all  have  a  powerful  soporific  virtue.  And 
these  little  volumes  contain  less  than  one 
in  twenty  of  the  plays  actually  acted  :  they 
contain  only  the  more  readable  specimens. 
In  1873  or  thereabouts  Mr.  W.  S.  Gilbert 
made  an  examination  of  the  voluminous 
Account  of  the  English  Stage  from  1660 
to  1830,  written  by  the  Reverend  Mr. 
Geneste  and  contained  in  ten  solid  vol- 
umes. He  found  that  between  1700  and 
1830  nearly  four  thousand  dramatic  works 
of  one  kind  or  another  were  produced  in 
England  ;  and  he  declared  that  of  these 
four  thousand  plays  of  all  kinds  produced 
in  the  course  of  one  hundred  and  thirty 
years,  "three  thousand  nine  hundred  and 
fifty  are  absolutely  unknown,  except  by 
name,  to  any  but  professed  students  of 
English  dramatic  literature.  Of  the  re- 
maining fifty,  only  thirty-five  are  ever 
presented  on  the  English  boards  at  the 
present  day;  of  these  thirty- five,  only 
seventeen  are  works  of  acknowledged 
literary  merit ;  and  of  these  seventeen, 
only  eleven  can  claim  to  rank  as  standard 
works."  That  is  to  say,  that  during  the 


hundred  and  thirty  years  when  the  dra- 
ma in  England,  if  not  at  its  best,  was  at 
least  the  centre  of  literary  interest  and 
more  important  and  more  profitable  than 
any  other  department  of  literature,  only 
once  in  about  ten  years,  on  an  average, 
was  a  play  produced  which  by  some  union 
of  popular  attributes  with  literary  quality 
has  managed  to  survive  to  the  present 
day.  Only  one  play  in  ten  years  !  Since 
1830  have  we  not  seen  produced  on  the 
stage  more  often  than  once  in  ten  years 
plays  worthy  to  survive  the  century  and 
likely  to  accomplish  that  difficult  task? 

We  give  ear  to  the  picked  plays  of  the 
past,  and  we  give  no  thought  to  their  in- 
numerable companions  ''all  silent  and  all 
damned."  We  see  the  comedies  care- 
fully culled  by  time,  and  we  do  not  see 
their  unlovely  companions  all  faded  and 
gone.  We  look  abroad  on  the  theatre  of 
our  own  time,  and  the  weeds  have  sprung 
up  with  the  flowers,  and  they  are  far  more 
numerous  than  the  flowers,  and  they  hide 
the  flowers  from  us  ;  and  many  are  wont 
to  deny  that  there  are  any  flowers  at  all. 
But  the  managers  of  the  theatres  in  the 


'95 


year  1983  will  probably  find  little  diffi- 
culty in  picking  out  of  the  ten  thousand 
plays  produced  in  England  and  America 
between  1800  and  1900  at  least  ten  equal 
in  quality  to  the  average  of  those  which 
now  survive  from  among  the  plays  writ- 
ten between  1700  and  1800. 

It  is  not  a  hard  task  to  make  out  a  list 
of  the  so-called  "  Old  Comedies,"  and  the 
examination  is  not  without  interest.  Mr. 
Gilbert  did  not  go  further  back  than  1 700 ; 
and,  as  it  happens,  there  is  only  one  play 
older  than  1700  which  still  holds  the  stage 
— except  certain  of  Shakspere's.  This  one 
play  is  the  "  New  Way  to  Pay  Old  Debts  " 
of  Massinger,  acted  at  the  Phoenix  in 
Drury  Lane  and  published  in  1633.  For 
seventy  years  after  1633  no  English  com- 
edy was  acted  which  keeps  the  boards 
nowadays.  After  1703  they  come  a  little 
more  closely  together ;  and  it  is  perhaps 
best  to  draw  up  a  chronological  list  of 
them,  giving  the  name  of  the  author  and 
the  title  of  the  comedy. 

1703— Colley  Gibber's  "  She  Would  and  She 
Would  Not." 


i96 

1709 — Mrs.  Centlivre's  "  Busybody." 

1717 — Mrs.  Centlivre's  "  Wonder  !  a  Woman 
Keeps  a  Secret." 

J759— [Garrick's  ?]  "High  Life  Below 
Stairs." 

1761 — Colman's  "  Jealous  Wife." 

1762 — Foote's  "Liar." 

1766 — Garrick  and  Colman's  "  Clandestine 
Marriage." 

1 773 — Goldsmith's  ' '  She  Stoops  to  Conquer. " 

1775 — Sheridan's  "Rivals." 

1777— Sheridan's  "School  for  Scandal." 

1779 — Sheridan's  "Critic;  or,  a  Tragedy 
Rehearsed. " 

1780 — Mrs.  Cowley's  "Belle's  Stratagem." 

1792 — Holcroft's  "  Road  to  Ruin." 

1794— O'Keefe's  "  Wild  Oats." 

1797 — Colman  the  Younger's  "Heir-at- 
Law." 

1801 — Colman  the  Younger's  "Poor  Gentle- 
man." 

1805 — Colman  the  Younger's  "John  Bull." 

1805 — Tobin's  "Honeymoon." 

From  1805  to  1830  no  comedy  was  pro- 
duced of  sufficient  vitality  to  have  come 
down  to  us.  But  between  1830  and  1860 
several  plays  were  produced  which  have 


been   included    among  the   "  Old   Com- 
edies."    These  are  : 

1832 — Knowles's  "Hunchback." 

!$37 — Knowles's  "Love  Chase." 

1840 — Bulwer's  "  Money." 

1841 — Boucicault's  "  London  Assurance." 

1844 — Boucicault's  "  Old  Heads  and  Young 

Hearts." 
1852 — Reade    and    Taylor's    "  Masks    and 

Faces." 
1855— Taylor's  "  Still  Waters  Run  Deep." 

Here,  then,  we  have  twenty-five  plays 
written  and  acted  between  1705  and 
1855,  a  space  of  a  century  and  a  half. 
These  are  the  "  Old  Comedies,"  and  they 
are  the  survivors  out  of  at  least  five  thou- 
sand dramatic  pieces  of  one  kind  or  an- 
other. Of  course  this  list  of  "  Old  Com- 
edies" is  not  absolutely  identical  with 
that  which  would  be  drawn  up  by  any 
other  student  of  the  stage.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  probably  no  two  persons  would 
agree  on  exactly  the  same  twenty-five 
"  Old  Comedies ;"  nor  would  another 
writer  inevitably  limit  the  number  to 
precisely  the  quarter  of  a  hundred.  Due 
allowance  must  be  made  for  the  personal 


equation.  As  yet  the  canon  of  the  "  Old 
Comedies  "  has  not  been  closed  and  declar- 
ed by  any  council.  The  present  list,  how- 
ever, is  my  doxy,  and  I  do  not  believe 
that  your  doxy  would  differ  greatly  from 
it.  Any  list  would  probably  contain  at 
least  twenty  of  these  twenty-five.  And 
as  no  list  can  be  promulgated  by  author- 
ity, the  one  given  above  may  serve  as 
well  as  another. 

One  of  the  first  remarks  one  feels  called 
on  to  make,  after  considering  this  list  of 
"  Old  Comedies,"  is  that  there  has  been 
no  decline  and  falling  off  in  the  comic 
drama  as  here  represented,  and  that — 
excepting  always  the  plays  of  Goldsmith 
and  Sheridan,  two  exceptional  drama- 
tists— the  comedies  written  in  this  cen- 
tury are  quite  equal  in  literary  value  and 
theatrical  effect  to  the  comedies  written 
in  the  last  century.  Without  going  again 
into  this  quarrel  of  the  ancients  and  mod- 
erns, it  may  be  said  safely  that  the  five 
latest  plays  on  this  list  are  not  inferior 
to  the  five  earliest.  Lord  Lytton's  "  Mon- 
ey," Boucicault's  "  London  Assurance  " 
and  "  Old  Heads  and  Young  Hearts," 


Reade  and  Taylor's  "  Masks  and  Faces," 
and  Taylor's  "  Still  Waters  Run  Deep," 
taken  together  are  quite  as  interesting  a 
quintet  as  Colley  Gibber's  "  She  Would 
and  She  Would  Not,"  Mrs.  Cowley's 
"  Busybody  "  and  "  Wonder  "  (Townley's 
or  Garrick's)  "  High  Life  Below  Stairs," 
and  Colman's  "Jealous  Wife."  Artificial 
as  are  "  London  Assurance  "  and  "  Old 
Heads  and  Young  Hearts,"  they  are  not 
more  artificial  than  "  She  Would  and  She 
Would  Not "  or  the  "  Busybody,"  and  they 
are  quite  as  lively  and  as  bustling  and  as 
full  of  the  rattle  and  snap  of  epigram  and 
equivoke.  In  Gibber,  indeed,  the  charac- 
ters are  wholly  external,  and  the  superfi- 
cial movement  does  not  completely  mask 
the  essential  emptiness  ;  while  in  Jesse 
Rural  Boucicault  has  drawn  with  many 
caressing  and  tender  touches  a  type  of 
simple  and  gentle  goodness  not  unworthy 
of  Goldsmith,  by  whom,  no  doubt,  it  was 
suggested.  It  cannot  be  denied  that 
there  has  been  of  late  years  a  falling  off 
in  the  drama  of  poetic  ideals  and  resolute 
elevation,  from  which  the  popular  taste 
seems  in  some  way  to  have  turned  ;  but 


it  may  be  denied  most  emphatically  that 
there  has  been  any  falling  off  in  comedy 
itself. 

Another  remark  called  forth  by  a  con- 
sideration of  this  list  of  "  Old  Comedies  " 
is  that  although  English  comedy  is  very 
lively — far  livelier  than  French,  for  ex- 
ample— fuller  of  bustle  and  gayety  and  far 
nearer  to  farce,  it  is  not  lacking  in  a  sub- 
stantial morality.  Probably  no  one  of 
these  twenty -five  "Old  Comedies"  was 
written  with  conscious  moral  purpose  and 
to  declare  the  viciousness  of  vice  and  the 
virtuousness  of  virtue ;  and  no  one  of 
them  obtrudes  any  other  moral  than  the 
ever-admirable  moral  of  a  healthy  life  and 
of  the  duty  of  gayety  and  innocent  mirth. 
Assuredly  none  of  these  comedies  is  fit  to 
serve  as  a  subject  of  Sunday  meditation. 
It  was  Goethe  in  his  old  age  who  said, 
"  It  is  strange  that  with  all  I  have  done, 
there  is  not  one  of  my  poems  that  would 
suit  the  Lutheran  hymn-book."  With 
the  exception  of  Boucicault's  two  plays, 
which  were  the  work  of  an  old  heart 
and  a  young  head,  and  which  are  hard 
in  tone  and  therefore  not  altogether 


wholesome,  there  is  no  one  of  these  plays 
which  any  girl  might  fear  taking  her 
mother  to  see.  There  is  no  one  of  them 
which  leaves  a  bad  taste  in  the  mouth. 
There  is  no  one  of  them  which  will  give 
you  a  troubled  conscience  at  night  or  a 
troubled  head  in  the  morning.  There  is 
no  one  of  them  which  will  not  give  a 
hearty  laugh  and  an  hour  of  pleasant 
amusement. 

To  ask  more  than  this  is  to  ask  too 
much.  Veluti  in  speculo  and  Castigat 
ridendo  mores  are  good  enough  mottoes 
for  a  drop-curtain,  but  they  are  not  to  be 
taken  seriously  as  part  of  the  code  of  crit- 
icism. We  look  in  the  mirror,  and  we  see 
our  neighbor's  failings  and  our  neigh- 
bor's faults.  The  comic  writer  laughing- 
ly castigates  manners,  and  we  laughingly 
see  the  lash  fall  on  our  neighbor's  back. 
"  There  are  now  quite  as  many  Celimenes, 
Alcestes,  Arnolphes,  and  Tartuffes  as  there 
were  in  Moliere's  time,"  says  the  younger 
Dumas,  one  of  the  masters  of  modern 
comedy  ;  "  we  each  of  us  recognize  them, 
but  they  do  not  recognize  themselves." 
In  other  words,  comedy  corrects  no  one ; 


and,  of  a  truth,  correction  is  not  the  true 
mission  of  comedy.  Conceding  that  Shak- 
spere's  "  Taming  of  the  Shrew  "  never 
cured  a  virago  or  Moliere's  "Miser"  a 
miser,  so  much  the  worse  for  the  virago 
and  the  miser ;  it  is  enough  for  comedy 
that  it  confirms  the  healthy  in  their 
health.  So  Lessing,  the  foremost  of  Ger- 
man moralists,  tells  us  ;  and  he  adds  that 
Moliere's  "  Miser  "  is  instructive  to  the  ex- 
travagant man,  and  Regnard's  "  Game- 
ster "  to  the  man  who  never  gambles :  "  the 
follies  they  themselves  have  not,  others 
may  have  with  whom  they  have  to  live." 
Perhaps  no  better  words  can  be  found 
with  which  to  close  this  paper  than  those 
of  Lessing  on  this  very  subject :  "  Comedy 
is  to  do  us' good  through  laughter,  but  not 
through  derision  ;  not  just  to  counteract 
those  faults  at  which  it  laughs,  nor  simply 
and  solely  in  those  persons  who  possess 
these  laughable  faults.  Its  true  general 
use  consists  in  laughter  itself;  in  the  prac- 
tice of  our  powers  to  discern  the  ridicu- 
lous, to  discern  it  easily  and  quickly  under 
all  cloaks  of  passion  and  fashion  ;  in  all 
admixture  of  good  and  bad  qualities,  even 


in  the  wrinkles  of  solemn  earnestness.  .  .  . 
A  preservative  is  a  valuable  medicine, 
and  all  morality  has  none  more  powerful 
and  effective  than  the  ridiculous." 


III.— A   PLEA   FOR   FARCE 

IN  one  of  the  best  edited  and  best  writ- 
ten, most  careful  and  most  conscientious 
newspapers  in  New  York  I  read,  not  long 
ago,  a  criticism  of  a  new  comedy,  which 
was  praised  as  "  possessing  a  serious  as 
well  as  a  comic  interest,  and  rarely  de- 
scending to  the  level  of  absolute  farce." 
Apparently  the  critic  here  asserts  by  in- 
sinuation that  "  absolute  farce "  can  be 
found  only  in  the  lowest  levels  of  the 
dramatic  mine.  A  similar  assumption  is 
frequent  in  current  theatrical  criticism, 
and  the  theatrical  critic  is  not  seldom 
moved  to  bemoan  the  decadence  of  the 
drama  as  indicated  by  the  decline  of 
comedy  and  the  acceptance  of  farce  in 
its  stead.  The  theatrical  critic,  it  may 


be  remarked  incidentally,  generally  insists 
on  illuminating  the  present  by  the  light 
of  other  days,  and  he  is  prone  to  cry  O 
temporal  O  mores!  which,  after  all,  is 
but  the  Latin  for  the  latter-day  and  more 
logical  autre  temps,  autres  moeurs  ! 

"  Life,"  as  one  of  Margaret  Fuller's  girl 
pupils  once  said,  "  is  to  laugh  or  cry,  ac- 
cording to  our  constitution."  To  many, 
if  not  to  most,  it  is  nobler  to  cry  than  to 
laugh.  The  tear  is  more  dignified  than 
the  smile.  Thus  tragedy  claims  a  supe- 
riority over  comedy  and  still  more  over 
farce.  "  Lret  a  man  of  cheerful  disposi- 
tion," writes  Mr.  Lecky,  in  his  History 
of  European  Morals  (3d  ed.,  vol.  i.,  p.  85), 
seeking  to  prove  the  power  of  our  in- 
tuitions— "let  a  man  of  cheerful  disposi- 
tion, and  of  cultivated  but  not  very  fas- 
tidious taste,  observe  his  own  emotions 
and  the  countenances  of  those  around 
him  during  the  representation  of  a  clever 
tragedy  and  of  a  clever  farce,  and  it  is 
probable  that  he  will  come  to  the  conclu- 
sion that  his  enjoyment  in  the  latter  case 
has  been  both  more  unmingled  and  more 
intense  than  in  the  former.  He  has  felt 


no  lassitude,  he  has  not  endured  the 
amount  of  pain  that  necessarily  accom- 
panies the  pleasure  of  pathos ;  he  has 
experienced  a  vivid,  absorbing  pleasure, 
and  he  has  traced  similar  emotions  in  the 
violent  demonstrations  of  his  neighbors. 
Yet  he  will  readily  admit  that  the  pleas- 
ure derived  from  the  tragedy  is  of  a 
higher  order  than  that  derived  from  the 
farce.  Sometimes  he  will  find  himself 
hesitating  which  of  the  two  he  will  choose. 
The  love  of  mere  enjoyment  leads  him  to 
the  one.  A  sense  of  its  nobler  character 
inclines  him  to  the  other." 

It  would  take  too  long  to  consider  here 
at  length  why  it  is  that  tragedy  is  in- 
tuitively acknowledged  to  be  nobler  than 
farce ;  but  the  fact  admits  of  no  dispute. 
Tragedy  is  held  to  be  higher  than  com- 
edy, and  comedy  is  held  to  be  higher 
than  farce.  Perhaps  a  consciousness  that 
tragedy  and  comedy  are  nobler  forms  of 
the  drama  is  the  cause  that  the  estima- 
tion of  farce  is  unduly  low.  Perhaps 
even  the  greater  and  more  boisterous 
entertainment  afforded  by  farce  is  the 
cause  of  the  contempt  in  which  many 


206 


affect  to  hold  it,  for  there  is  a  strange 
tendency  in  mankind  to  despise  those 
who  amuse  it,  especially  if  the  laughter 
excited  is  at  all  hearty  and  robust.  A 
shrewd  and  ambitious  politician  never 
dares  to  be  as  funny  as  he  can  ;  he  knows 
that  it  is  better  to  make  the  people  take 
him  seriously;  he  curbs  his  humor  as 
best  he  may ;  and  rather  than  be  hailed 
as  a  wit  he  is  willing,  by  force  of  dul- 
ness,  to  attain  a  reputation  for  profundity. 
Now  I,  for  one,  at  least,  fail  to  see  any 
reason  why  farce  should  be  stamped  with 
the  stigma  of  illegitimacy.  There  are 
degrees  in  the  drama,  no  doubt,  and  the 
highest  places  are  reserved  for  tragedy 
and  for  comedy;  but  melodrama  and 
burlesque  and  farce  are  all  legitimate 
dramatic  forms,  and  they  have  each  an 
honorable  pedigree.  Modern  melodra- 
ma may  recognize  itself  in  some  of  the 
plays  of  Euripides  and  Sophocles  ;  and  M. 
d'Ennery,  for  example,  would  not  disavow 
CEdipus  Rex.  Burlesque  may  claim  as 
its  founder  that  great  poet  Aristophanes, 
and  as  one  of  its  friends  the  author  of 
"  A  Midsummer-Night's  Dream."  Farce 


could  trace  its  descent  from  Menander 
and  from  Plautus,  if  it  needed  to  go  fur- 
ther back  than  the  authors  of  the  "  Merry 
Wives  of  Windsor"  and  the  "  Precieuses 
Ridicules." 

One  of  the  phenomena  of  theatrical 
history  is  the  scarcity  of  comedy  and  the 
prevalence  of  farce.  There  has  been  no 
time  recorded  in  the  annals  of  the  Eng- 
lish stage  when  the  critics  were  not  com- 
plaining of  the  dearth  of  real  comedy,  and 
denouncing  the  plethora  of  farce.  As  we 
look  along  the  list  of  old  comedies  which 
keep  the  stage  to  this  day,  we  find  a  very 
large  proportion  of  farces.  What  are 
"She  Would  and  She  Would  Not,"  "The 
Country  Girl  "  and  "  The  Busybody  "  but 
farces?  Goldsmith's  enemies  denounced 
"  She  Stoops  to  Conquer  "  as  farce,  and 
declared  that  some  of  its  incidents  were 
too  low  even  for  that.  Sheridan's  friends 
cannot  deny  that  a  good  half  at  least  of 
"  The  Rivals  "  is  frank  farce — and,  in  fact, 
it  is  the  better  half.  And  as  for  the 
"  Heir-at-Law  " — with  which  Mr.  Jeffer- 
son and  Mr.  Florence  have  been  delight- 
ing us  of  late,  and  which  many  theatrical 


critics  have  been  as  prompt  to  praise  as 
they  would  be  swift  to  condemn  were  any 
living  author  to  bring  forth  such  a  het- 
erogeny  of  absurdities — Colman's  farrago 
of  oddity  and  commonplace  is  farce,  if  it 
is  anything  at  all.  In  fact,  it  is  difficult 
to  deny  the  frequent  exactness  of  the 
epigram  declaring  that  "a  comedy  is  a 
farce  by  an  author  who  is  dead." 

The  only  play  of  contemporary  English 
life  which  Shakspere  wrote,  the  "  Merry 
Wives  of  Windsor,"  is  a  farce,  and  not  a 
very  good  farce  either.  The  one  play 
which  he  borrowed  from  a  Latin  drama- 
tist, the  "  Comedy  of  Errors,"  is  a  farce, 
and  not  a  very  good  farce.  The  best  of 
Shakspere's  farces  is  the  "  Taming  of 
the  Shrew,"  which  has  a  contagion  of 
humor  and  a  swing  of  movement  lacking 
in  the  others,  despite  their  rapidity  and 
their  bustle.  Of  all  the  last -century 
stage -versions  of  Shakspere  the  most 
tolerable  is  Garrick's  "  Katherine  and  Pe- 
truchio."  The  only  other  farces  of  that 
century  which  rival  it  are  the  delightful 
"  High  Life  Below  Stairs  "  (which  Garrick 
probably  wrote)  and  the  "  Critic  "  (which 


was  written  by  Sheridan,  Garrick's  suc- 
cessor in  the  management  of  Drury  Lane 
Theatre,  and  which  drove  from  the  stage 
the  earlier  farce  on  which  it  was  founded, 
the  "  Rehearsal,"  of  the  Duke  of  Buck- 
ingham). 

In  the  last  half  of  the  present  century 
not  a  few  of  the  best  of  our  plays  are 
farces,  and  though  we  may  think  lightly  of 
those  who  make  us  laugh,  surely  we  ought 
to  be  grateful  to  Mr.  Bronson  Howard 
for  "Saratoga,"  to  Mr.  Gilbert  for  "En- 
gaged," to  Mr.  Grundy  for  the  "  Snow- 
ball, "  and  to  Mr.  Pinero  for  the  "  Magis- 
trate." Two  of  the  greatest  successes  of 
the  British  stage  in  the  past  score  of 
years  have  been  "  Pink  Dominos,"  an 
adaptation  of  a  French  farce,  and  the 
"  Private  Secretary,"  an  adaptation  of  a 
German  farce.  Three  of  the  greatest  suc- 
cesses of  the  American  stage  in  the  same 
period  have  been  Mr.  Daly's  "  Big  Bo- 
nanza," "7-20-8,"  and  "A  Night  Off,"  all 
three  of  them  adapted  from  German 
farces. 

In  the  French  theatre  farce  has  been 
as  prolific  and  as  popular  as  in  ours.  A 
14 


very  large  proportion  of  Moliere's  best 
/work  took  the  form  of  farce.  "  Les  Pre- 
cieuses  Ridicules,"  the  "  Medecin  Mal- 
gre  Lui,"  the  "  Malade  Imaginaire,"  the 
"  Etourdi,"  "  Monsieur  de  Pourceaugnac  " 
— what  are  all  these  but  farces  ?— and  the 
''Bourgeois  Gentilhom me "  is  perilously 
close  to  it.  The  comic  plays  of  Regnard 
are  called  comedies,  and  as  such  apparently 
they  are  accepted  by  the  French ;  but  most 
of  them  and  the  best  of  them  are  farce- 
exuberant,  robustious,  and  inordinately 
funny  farce.  Could  any  one  ever  be  in 
doubt  whether  the  "  Legataire  Universel  " 
was  comedy  or  farce  ?  And  in  the  two 
great  comedies  of  Beaumarchais,  the 
"  Barbier  de  Seville  "  and  the  "  Mariagede 
Figaro,"  there  is  more  than  a  mere  in- 
fusion of  farce ;  certain  acts  are  super- 
saturated with  it.  In  this  century,  Scribe 
and  M.  Sardou  have  written  farces  as  they 
have  written  plays  of  every  other  sort; 
and  in  its  day  "  Oscar ;  ou,  Le  Mari  qui 
trompe  sa  Femme"  was  as  risky  and  as 
broadly  humorous  as  was  "  Divorgons  "  a 
generation  later.  And  lives  there  a  man 
with  soul  so  dead  and  so  impervious  to 


humor  as  not  to  dissolve  into  laughter  at 
the  sight  of  the  "  Panache"  of  Gondinet, 
of  the  "  Boule  "  and  the  "  Tricoche  et 
Cacolet "  of  MM.  Meilhac  and  Halevy,  and 
of  the  "  Chapeau  de  paille  d'ltalie,"  the 
"  Cagnotte  "  and  the  "Trente  Millions  de 
Gladiator"  of  Labiche? 

Surely  a  form  of  art  which  can  show  as-, 
long  a  roll  of  masterpieces  as  farce  is  not 
despicable.  Surely  it  deserves  to  be 
treated  with  the  respect  paid  to  the  other 
forms  of  the  drama.  It  is  not  as  difficult, 
perhaps,  as  comedy,  which  depends  on 
the  clash  of  character  and  the  sparkle  of 
epigram ;  but  it  is  not  easy.  It  is  an  art 
with  laws  of  its  own.  It  is  not  burlesque, 
for  one  thing,  although  it  is  akin  to 
burlesque ;  and  a  marriage  between  the 
two  is  within  the  forbidden  degrees. 

Like  true  burlesque,  as  distinguished 
from  mere  extravaganza,  farce  demands 
the  utmost  seriousness  in  its  conception 
and  in  its  performance.  Garrick  declared 
that  comedy  was  a  serious  thing  —  he 
would  not  have  denied  that  farce  is  even 
more  serious.  Farce  is  negative  towards 
burlesque  and  positive  towards  comedy; 


it  repels  the  one  and  attracts  the  other. 
While  farce  and  burlesque  are  abhorrent 
and  cannot  be  joined  to  advantage,  farce 
and  comedy  combine  readily  and  melt 

/  one  into  the  other  in  vague  and  imper- 
ceptible fluctuations.  The  farcical-com- 
edy is  not  only  a  legitimate  form  of  art, 
but  it  is  almost  inevitable,  as  we  learn  by 
looking  down  the  long  vista  of  the  drama 
and  seeing  how  very  often  it  has  blos- 
somed luxuriantly.  The  bastard  hybrid 
called  "  farce-comedy,"  prevalent  of  late  in 
our  theatres — a  queer  medley  of  various 
kinds  of  entertainment,  musical,  saltato- 
rial,  pantomimic,  and  even  acrobatic- 
may  be  often  clever,  but  it  is  rarely  either 
farce  or  comedy. 

In  the  history  of  literature,  as  in  nat- 
ural history,  advancing  science  has  shown 
us  that  there  are  no  hard  and  fast  lines 
between  species  and  genera,  but  insen- 
sible gradations  from  one  to  the  other, 
with  scarcely  a  missing  link  anywhere. 
Farce  bears  much  the  same  relation  to 

'  comedy  that  melodrama  does  to  tragedy. 
In  farce  and  in  melodrama  there  is  a 
more  summary  psychology  than  in  com- 


edy  and  in  tragedy.  Evemts  are  of  more 
importance  than  the  persons  to  whom 
they  happen.  The  author  seeks  to  in- 
terest the  spectator  rather  in  things  than 
in  men  and  women ;  he  relies  more  on 
the  force  of  situation  than  on  the  develop- 
ment of  character. 

Mr.  William  Archer  (the  one  critic  of 
the  acted  drama  in  England  who  is 
worthy  to  be  named  with  M.  Francisque 
Sarcey,  the  chief  critic  of  the  acted  drama 
in  France)  says  that  "melodrama  may 
be  defined  as  illogical  tragedy,  in  which 
causes  and  effects  are  systematically  dis- 
proportionate, and  the  hero  is  the  play- 
thing of  special  providences."  So  farce 
may  be  defined  as  an  ultra-logical  com- 
edy, in  which  everything  is  pushed  to  ex- 
tremes, and  the  hero  is  the  plaything  of 
special  providences.  In  farce,  for  in- 
stance, we  see  a  fibster  involving  himself 
in  unending  snarls,  and  yet  in  the  end 
getting  off  scot-free.  And  the  moral  of 
the  play  is  not  in  the  happy  ending 
brought  about  arbitrarily  and  as  the  dram- 
atist please  ;  it  resides  rather  in  the  hearty 
laughter  which  has  cleared  the  air,  and 


which  is  a  boon  in  itself  and  a  gift  to  be 
thankful  for.  Laughter  is  the  great  an- 
tiseptic; and  it  is  quick  to  kill  the  germs 
of  unwholesome  sentimentality  by  which 
comedy  is  often  attacked. 

But  laughter  is  a  gift  for  which  man- 
kind is  rarely  as  grateful  as  it  ought  to 
be.  We  are  eager  to  find  distraction 
rom  worry  and  surcease  of  sorrow  if  only 
for  a  moment,  and  we  are  ready  to  pay 
the  humorist  the  wages  he  asks.  Yet 
oddly  enough,  we  are  often  ashamed  of 
our  own  laughter,  and  we  are  prone  to 
visit  this  qualm  of  conscience  upon  the 
author  of  our  amusement.  Farce  is  a 
natural  and  useful  form  of  the  drama ;  it 
reckons  many  a  masterpiece ;  and  to 
make  it  bear  the  bar  sinister  is  unkind 
and  unfair. 


THE   END 


HARPER'S   AMERICAN    ESSAYISTS 

i6mo,  Cloth,  Ornamental,  $i  oo  each. 


AS  WE  GO.  By  CHARLES  DUDLEY  WARNER.  With 
Portrait  and  Illustrations. 

THE  WORK  OF  JOHN  RUSKIN.  By  CHARLES 
WALDSTEIN.  With  Portrait. 

PICTURE  AND  TEXT.  By  HENRY  JAMES.  With 
Portrait  and  Illustrations. 

AMERICANISMS  AND  BRITICISMS.  With  Other 
Essays  on  Other  Isms.  By  BRANDER  MATTHEWS. 
With  Portrait. 

FROM  THE  BOOKS  OF  LAURENCE  HUTTON. 

With  Portrait. 

CONCERNING  ALL  OF  US.  By  THOMAS  WENT- 
WORTH  HIGGINSON.  With  Portrait. 

FROM  THE  EASY  CHAIR.  By  GEORGE  WILLIAM 
CURTIS.  With  Portrait. 

OTHER  ESSAYS  FROM  THE  EASY  CHAIR.  By 
GEORGE  WILLIAM  CURTIS.  With  Portrait. 

AS  WE  WERE  SAYING.  By  CHARLES  DUDLEY 
WAKNBR.  With  Portrait  and  Illustrations. 

CRITICISM  AND  FICTION.  By  WILLIAM  DEAN 
HOWELLS.  With  Portrait. 


PUBLISHED  BY  HARPER  &  BROTHERS,  NEW  YORK. 
^W^  The  above  works  are  for  sale  by  all  booksellers, 
or  will  be  sent  by  the  publishers,  postage  prepaid,  to  any 
part  of  the  United  States,  Canada,  or  Mexico,  on  receipt 
of  the  price. 


BY  BRANDER  MATTHEWS. 


STUDIES  OF  THE  STAGE.  With  Portrait.  i6mo, 
Cloth,  Ornamental. 

THE  STORY  OF  A  STORY,  and  Other  Stories.     Il- 
lustrated.    i6mo,  Cloth,  Ornamental,  $i  25. 
These  stories  have  a  light  felicitous  touch  that  is  well- 
nigh  the  perfection  of  polished  story-telling.     They  are 
stamped  with  an  exquisite  refinement  of  the  art,  and  ev- 
ery telling  point  is  delicately  emphasized. — Boston  Tran- 
script. 

AMERICANISMS  AND  BRITICISMS,  with  Other 
Essays  on  Other  Isms.  With  Portrait.  i6mo,  Cloth, 
Ornamental,  $i  oo. 

A  racy,  delightful  little  book.  .  .  .  It  is  a  long  time 
since  we  have  met  with  such  a  combination  of  keen  yet 
fair  criticism,  genuine  wit  and  literary  grace.  The  skill 
with  which  certain  limitations  of  English  literary  people, 
past  or  present,  are  indicated  is  as  impressive  as  it  is 
artistic. — Congregationalist,  Boston. 

THE  DECISION   OF  THE   COURT.     A  Comedy. 

Illustrated.     32010,  Cloth,  Ornamental,  50  cents. 

It  is  thoroughly  amusing,  without  a  superfluous  word. 
— Boston  Herald. 

IN  THE  VESTIBULE  LIMITED.     A  Story.     Illus- 
trated.    321110,  Cloth,  Ornamental,  50  cents. 
For  compressed,  swift,  clear  narrative  this  bit  of  genre 
work  in  fiction  is  unsurpassed.     As  a  character  study 
it  shows  keen  psychological  insight.     There  is  no  at- 
tempt at  being  funny,  yet  the  reader  is  continually  just 
on  the  point  of  breaking  out  into  laughter.—  Interior, 
Chicago. 


PUBLISHED  BY  HARPER  &  BROTHERS,  NEW  YORK. 
^W  For  sale  by  all  booksellers,  or  ivill  be  sent  by  mail, 
postage  prepaid,  to  any  part  of  the  United  States,  Can- 
ada, or  Mexico,  on  receipt  of  tJie  price. 


•tf, 


s 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


